*From The Marxist Archives- Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution

Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.

From the Archives- The Fight For Women's Liberation in SDS

Commentary

March Is Women's History Month

This article is passed on as an item of historical interest to the radical movement. It is a companion archival document to one posted here earlier this year about connecting the struggles to the working class, the central focus in overturning the old society. I would only comment that some of the analysis reads as though it could have been written today, although some ideas expressed here in general terms has been greatly expanded by the last generation of feminist and socialist work on the relation between class and gender.

Moreover, today there is no mass radical youth movement or other audience ready to 'storm heaven' to direct such sentiments toward. At that time radical youth, including radical black and white working class youth, were looking for ways to fundamentally change society and to fight against that generation’s war in Vietnam. In those days radicals, moreover, after the experiences of 1968, for the most part, stood point blank against the bourgeois parties and were out in the streets. Today those who are trying to ‘brain-trust’ a new SDS for this generation of youth seem to have regressed to a point early in the evolution of old SDS where the youth were directed toward 'going half-way with LBJ ( Lyndon Baines Johnson)' and the Democratic Party. We should, however, try to learn something from history. Read on.

Workers Vanguard no. 910 W March 2008

"The Fight for Women's Liberation"

Revolutionary Marxists at December 1969 SDS Conference (Young Spartacus pages)

In honor of International Women's Day {March 8), we reprint below a position paper first presented at the December 1969 New Haven conference of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) by the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC), forerunner of today's Spartacus Youth Clubs. This is a historic document of the Spartacist League, part of our struggle to bring the materialist, Marxist analysis of the nature of women's oppression to the New Left in the period of the early growth of the radical women's liberation movement We put forward the understanding that the core institution of women's oppression, the family, arose with private property (see The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels). While women's oppression is distinct from and predates the oppression of the working class, it can only be ended through socialist revolution. This analysis stands against both "lifestyle liberationist" feminists who view gender as the main division in society and Stalinists (Maoist and otherwise) who hold the position that the family can be "a unit for fighting the ruling class" (as the Worker-Student Alliance [WSA] caucus in SDS argued).

SDS was originally the youth group of the Cold War, anti-Soviet "socialists" of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). SDS moved leftward under the impact of events, particularly the struggle of the civil rights movement against Jim Crow segregation in the South and, later, the struggles against the Vietnam War. In 1962, SDS's Port Huron Statement toned down the overt anti-Communism mat was the stock in trade of the LID social democrats, and in retribution SDS leaders were locked out of their offices. By the end of 1965, SDS had dropped its anti-Communist exclusion clause and split from the LID entirely. It grew rapidly, drawing in tens of thousands of young activists at its peak.

In the summer of 1969, SDS underwent a split. As part of an orientation toward revolutionary regroupment, die RMC, supporters of the Trotskyist program of the Spartacist League, critically supported the wing led by Progressive Labor (PL) and its WSA caucus, which put forward a crudely pro-working-class orientation as against the generally Maoist National Collective. PL itself had been formed from a left split from the extremely reformist Communist Party in the direction of Maoism.

The context of widespread leftward movement, fueled not least by opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft, and the politically open character of SDS provided an arena for revolutionary Marxists to struggle for our program. The RMC sought to take full advantage of this necessarily time-limited situation in winning young would-be revolutionaries to Marxism. To this end, we put forward position papers and resolutions arguing for the program of revolutionary proletarian internationalism. We fought for Marxism as a program for the liberation of all of humanity, especially highlighting the need for a materialist program to confront the oppression of women and blacks (see also "Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics," WV No. 897,31 August 2007).

This position paper also mentions in passing the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC). The former was the youth organization of the Socialist Workers Party, a once Trotskyist organization by then degenerated into reformism—as exemplified by its leading role in the class-collaborationist National Peace Action Coalition. The Coalition's purpose was to appeal to liberal Democratic Party politicians who sought to extricate American imperialism from the losing colonial war in Vietnam and to head off a challenge to the capitalist order at home. The ISC were a left split from the Cold Warriors of the Socialist Party who purveyed the same anti-Sovietism with different trappings. Today, readers will recognize them as the still rabidly anti-Communist and helplessly liberal International Socialist Organization.

* * * *
I. SDS and Women's Liberation

SDS needs a clear, accurate class analysis of the special oppression of women and a Marxist program for women's liberation. No other radical youth group has yet undertaken this task. The YSA substitutes enthusiastic tail-ending for program; the ISC in their Statement of Principles patronizingly caters to the separatist mood by telling women that socialist revolution won't solve their problems automatically—as if other sorts of oppression would disappear without the intervention of consciousness?

The existing women's liberation movement, both liberal and radical, seems to see sex as the basic "class division" in society. This low level of theoretical development means an opportunity for Marxists to intervene with a working-class line. However, we will render our intervention useless if we cling to an oversimplified analysis that the only form of oppression is class oppression and confine our interest to the economic superexploitation of women workers.

The class question is the decisive issue in class society. However, other additional types of oppression do exist as well
—e.g., racial oppression, national oppression, women's oppression. To deny that Marxist revolutionaries must concern themselves with these issues is sectarian and blatantly anti-Leninist It is vital that revolutionaries participate in these struggles. The basis of such participation must be the realization that the class question is decisive and thus any movement which fails to identify itself with the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class is doomed to be beset by utopianism, crackpotism, liberal illusions and—ultimately—irrelevance.

The SDS resolution (which was sponsored by the WSA caucus and opposed by us) passed by our June convention (after the walk-out of the RYM [Revolutionary Youth Movement] splitters) did not provide a correct analysis or program. This failure was primarily due to an anti-historical, unMarxist method which resulted in an entirely incorrect position on the family.

II. Oppression and the Family

The June WSA resolution included the following statement: "The family does not have to be primarily reactionary. We should attempt to attack the bourgeois aspect and make the family a unit for fighting the ruling class."

This statement is flatly wrong. It ignores, in a crude anti-theoretical manner, the entire thrust of the Marxian critique of the family in order to accept as potentially revolutionary an institution which is inherently reactionary. The family can no more become a unit for fighting capitalism than can racial segregation, which is also a bourgeois institution. Both of these socio-economic institutions are oppressive and help maintain the capitalist system. Both are tools by which the ruling class maintains and strengthens false consciousness in the working class.

As a pro-working-class student organization, SDS must provide a Marxian class analysis of the social oppression of women. The primary source document for this analysis is The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in which Frederick Engels traces the history of the increasing oppression of women through the various stages of economic development of society, showing that the appearance of private property brought with it the necessity of transferring this property through inheritance. From this flows the need to trace descent; and since the male, in the primitive division of labor, had come to be the property-owner, he is therefore given the right to exclusive sexual access to the bearer of his children. Hence, the institution of marriage emerges.

Following the method of Engels, examining the oppression of women in class society and the nature of class society itself, we must seek its roots in the primitive division of labor, which resulted in the social division of man and woman, placing the latter in a subordinate position, as class society was born. Subsequently the class divisions transcended the sexual division, and class became the dominant reality of society. To put it another way, Mrs. Rockefeller and her maid both suffer in varying degree from the pervasive oppression of females and have some issues in common, but the maid has more in common with her own husband than with Mrs. Rockefeller.

Sexual divisions continue to be socially enforced, since they bolster the capitalist system. The social inferiority of women is maintained by the entire structure of class society, including its ideologies. Many women internalize and come to believe the false ideas of class culture, and actually feel themselves to be inferior. Women today tend to be "under-achievers"; feeling rightly that there is not much future for them, they waste their talents and energies on trivialities, decide to live through their families or succumb to despair. It is our task to offer to these women a worthwhile goal: their own liberation, which cannot be a personal "self-liberation" but requires a socialist revolution and the withering away of the family. As communist revolutionaries, further, these women will lead incomparably richer lives. They will come to understand their own oppression and the origins,
the nature and the future of the family. As stated by Engels:

"We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual, a man, and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and no other.

"For this purpose the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, inheritable wealth, the means of production, into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting.... The position of men will be very much altered, but the position of women, of att women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike whether or not they are, in bourgeois legal jargon, legitimate."

This is far from advocating that straw man of the bosses' press, that under communism men and women will live in separate barracks and all children will be brought up in a state orphanage. We are rather advocating the replacement of marriage as a compulsory economic unit with voluntary forms better suited to people's physical and emotional needs. Since the institution of the family is an integral part of the capitalist system, the struggle for women's liberation is inseparable from the struggle for a socialist revolution.

III. The Family and the Class

The WSA resolution states: "With the rise of capitalism and modern industry, the economic foundation on which the traditional family was based was destroyed. Women were taken out of the home and put into the factory. But the special exploitation of women, who became a cheap reserve labor force, continued. To justify the double exploitation of women workers, the ruling class fostered the ideology of male chauvinism."

To set the record straight, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution women and children formed the bulk of the industrial proletariat. The reasons for this are well established. Women and children were cheap, unskilled, docile labor used by the rising capitalists to batter down the wages of men (usually more highly paid) and to destroy the craft industries employing (relatively) highly paid male artisans. To quote Marx in Capital:

"The value of labor power was determined not only by the labor-time necessary to maintain the individual adult laborer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of the family into the labor market, spreads the value of man's labor-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labor power."

Consequently, workers with large families were often given preference by the early capitalists who, as a matter of fact, often compelled the worker to require his entire family to work in his factory or lose his job.

The bourgeoisie of this period actually devised ideological apologia for femaie and child labor (see Jurgen Kuczynski, The Rise of the Working Class, Chapter 2, "The Working Class Emerges"). The limitation of female and child labor (by, e.g., the Factory Acts in Britain) represented concessions wrested by the "working class from capital. The progressive withdrawal of this super-exploited labor from the factory system compelled the capitalists to employ machinery in their stead if they wished to remain in business.

The destruction of the traditional family by employing women and children in production creates the possibility of founding the relationship between the sexes on a new economic basis. But, the spontaneous way this employment developed with the rise of capital was, to quote Marx, "a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery" which the advanced sections of the working class fought. The kernel of this contradiction is that under capitalism the family remains—because there is no other socio-economic institution to replace it.

An Institution of Indoctrination

The bourgeoisie and its theorists tinkered with the old institutions in order to fit them better into the new industrial capitalism. In the age of disintegrating feudalism, before the capitalists had accumulated much experience in running their own system, some of them even toyed with very radical ideas regarding the state, family and religion. They soon learned, however, that whether they themselves liked conventional family life or not, or whether they believed in God or not, the institutions of religion and the family were indispensable for inculcating the required docility, submissiveness, respect for authority and superstition in the working class. Without religion and the family the workers would be far more likely to become troublesome. For this reason the bourgeoisie learned to pay public obeisance to the ideals of religion and the family whether they personally believed in them or not. When economically necessary, the capitalist class will tolerate and even encourage female and child labor—but without allowing the development of institutions to replace the family. The working woman is not really freed from her role as household slave by obtaining work outside the home; she merely has one responsibility added to another.

Although individual families were destroyed—and are being destroyed—by capitalism, the family as an institution was not hurt, as it rises or falls with the existence of private property. When economic considerations permitted, the ruling class periodically initiated campaigns, through the media and the churches, to get women back into the home. This tendency reached a peak of brutal chauvinism and cynical barbarism with the Nazi slogan, "Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche," which portrays the woman deluded by religion and as breeder, babysitter and cook. "The family that prays together stays together": both religion and the family are bourgeois institutions of false consciousness.

Functions of the Family

Women and children left the process of production, not chiefly because the capitalists feared for the nuclear family and forced them out but in large part because under capitalism no substitute for the family is available. The domestic labor performed by the housewife has no exchange value, and the family is socially necessary to maintain the working class. The necessity of the bourgeoisie to concentrate and transfer its wealth via inheritance makes the family an ideological necessity for capitalism. Also, the struggle by the working class to limit the exploitation of women and children necessarily caused production to become more capital-intensive, hence ultimately raising the standard of living of the entire working class while in the long run diminishing the amount of labor needed in production.

In the present period, a period of capitalism in decay, there simply are not enough jobs to go around. Women, because of the domestic role they of necessity (under capitalism) must more or less fulfill, are on the fringes of the reserve army of the working class. When they are needed in production (such as World War II) the capitalists have no compunctions about the sanctity of hearth and home, and will gladly hire them to do "men's" work and will just as gladly drop them from production when they are no longer needed. (An unemployed male ex-soldiery would be a far greater threat to the bourgeois order than the more docile women unemployed workers.)

The hollow satisfactions of male supremacy within the home oppress both the men and the women and encourage false consciousness (male chauvinism). By way of comparison, segregation is similarly a tool of oppression (the hollow satisfactions of white supremacy in the U.S. encourage whites to oppress blacks) and false consciousness (racism). The working man learns to direct his anger and frustrations against his wife, rather than against the bosses. He is told that he is the boss in his own home ("a man's home is his castle"). Thus, the family as an economic and social institution is a shackle on the consciousness of the men workers as well as that of women,

The Family in Non-Capitalist States

The family serves its reactionary function not only in capitalist societies but also in the bureaucratically-deformed workers' states—i.e., Russia, China, and those other nations which have abolished the material basis of the family—private property—but which still require the family as a socio-cultural institution in order to suppress the consciousness of the masses, rendering them subservient to the parasitic bureaucracies headed by Brezhnev & Co., Mao, etc.

For example, the initial effect of the Chinese revolution—which in its need to fight imperialism found itself completing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and establishing the property relations of a workers' state—was the unleashing of an immensely progressive social force. The feudal oppression of women was abolished. But in the absence of workers' democracy in China, policy is determined by the whim of the Maoist bureaucracy. Hence, the ambivalent attitude toward the family: thus the bureaucracy opposed birth control during the Great Leap Forward; today they encourage long periods of celibacy for the Chinese youth.

The survival of most features of bourgeois family life within the non-capitalist world simultaneously reveals something about both the family and the nature of these societies. The bourgeois family is still the family, similar in decisive respects to the family in non-capitalist but not classless (e.g., feudal and slave) societies. The family unit represents a division of social labor far older than capitalism, dating back to the first "class" division of labor, that between man and woman. As such, the family will require more than the abolition of capitalism (in and of itself) before it is superseded entirely by a freer system of relations between men and women, parents and children. Needless to say, the overthrow of the capitalists and their state by the regime of workers' power is absolutely essential to the liberation of individuals from the narrowness, authoritarianism and sexual inequality inherent in family life. But we should recognize that this task will not be fatty accomplished until the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historic mission: until class distinctions and their vestiges have been eradicated from society, i.e., mankind has reached the stage of classless society, communism. The same holds true for other features of class societies in general—aspects not simply peculiar to capitalism, such as the need for a state power over society, the existence of a certain amount of religious superstition, what Marx called "the idiocy of rural life," etc.

No society could today be entirely free of the dark heritage of the family with its sexual oppression and shut-in, stultifying life for the children. What is most repugnant to any revolutionist about family life in the deformed workers' states, however, is the feet that the political elite ruling these societies presents the survival of an archaic and reactionary institution as a great achievement in building socialism! The Bolsheviks in Lenin's time never glorified the family as an instrument—real or potential—for revolutionary socialist struggle and development. As far as the miserably insufficient level of Russian economy and culture permitted, they passed laws and created institutions designed to free Soviet citizens, particularly the women and children, from the oppressive and stultifying influence of the family. All this was of course reversed with the advent of Stalin's bureaucratic regime, which continues on to this day. After wiping out the left wing of the Communist Party and stripping the Soviets of power, the Stalinized regime proceeded to make divorce more difficult, illegalized abortion, enhanced parental authority, and worst of all called this adaptation to brutal barefoot Russian medievalism—socialism! For reasons which Stalinists find difficult to explain, the Soviet Great Leap Backward in policy regarding women and the family was led by the same parasitic gang who murdered the Old Bolsheviks of all viewpoints, throttled the Spanish revolution and let Hitler take power without firing a shot Just as Stalin was willing to use Great Russian chauvinism against national minorities, praise the Orthodox Church and foster anti-Semitism, so he found that the backward Russian family created a base for his bureaucratic and authoritarian aims. Even where private property no longer exists, the institution of the family serves—at best—to hinder the development of a socialist society. At worst it provides a base of support in the culture for the parasitic bureaucrats who barter away the gains of the revolution. SDS cannot wish away the social and cultural significance of the family by words about making it "a unit for fighting the ruling class." Reactionary institutions serve reactionary ends.


IV. The Working Woman

The economic aspects of the inferior position of women in our society provide the most immediate benefits to capitalism. Whenever capital needs to draw women out into the labor force, it has been able to use the ideology of male superiority to justify the super-exploitation of women workers—that is, women being paid less for doing the same work as the men. After all, "a woman's place is in the home," "a man has the responsibility of supporting a family, a woman only works because she wants to."

The assumption is that the woman's main role is that of the tender mother; hence, she is forced to take care of her children, even if they are unwanted, even when she is divorced. Any woman who wants more out of life is termed "unnatural" or "unfit." The lie is pushed that women are fit only for domestic chores and that therefore their labor is not worth as much as the labor of men.

Women make up one third of the American labor force, but the wages of the full-time working woman average only 60% of those of the average male working full-time. The non-white working woman, suffering under a double load of exploitation and oppression, must indeed be the most victimized category in American capitalist society. In itself, the lower average income of women workers roughly indicates the degree of their oppression, not their super-exploitation relative to working men. (They might—and do—take home less money because they are concentrated in less productive jobs.) But women, even more than other oppressed groups such as Black male workers, frequently receive less for work identical to that performed by more highly paid men. In addition to suffering oppression and discrimination, working -women are super-exploited in the literal and technical sense of the term.

Militancy or Passivity?

In the months ahead, many SDS members expect to have jobs, either full-time or temporary, in factories, on campus, in offices and hospitals, wherever labor struggles are going on. Those of us involved in assisting striking unions will be able to establish contacts with workers on the picket lines. As socialists, we must support the working class in its struggles and seek to raise consciousness, pointing out that male chauvinism divides the workers, that lower wages for women means lower wages for everyone. In Britain, where unions have calculated that wages would increase 11% if women received the same pay as men, equal pay for equal work has become a major union demand. In the U.S., a related process of awakening is going on.

Male chauvinism has made many women workers passive in accepting their lower wages and generally poorer working conditions. Many women are convinced that it isn't "ladylike" or "feminine" to be really militant, that political activity is only for men, that the picket line is too dangerous a place for women. These attitudes serve the bosses and most be fought Radicals should encourage militancy among women workers and relate women's oppression to the oppression and alienation that all workers experience under capitalism. Thus, women's liberation has an important role to play in the struggles of the working class. Further, situations sometimes arise where the women—because they are more oppressed by poor working conditions, low wages and speed-up—are more militant than the men. Women are not pale, fragile, helpless creatures; as workers engaged in industrial production, they can wield workers' power!

V. Male Chauvinism in the Student Movement

The student movement is infected with male chauvinism, a bourgeois ideology, as is the rest of society under capitalism. Long ago most of us faced up to our own deeply imbedded racist attitudes and began to conquer them. Now we must root out our male chauvinism as carefully. Here we are dealing with the social and psychological forms of discrimination rather than the economic aspects of male chauvinism. We must recognize also that no one—including our women members—is automatically exempt from male chauvinist attitudes. We must, by scrupulous attention to the content of a pro-women's liberation position, prevent the subject from becoming a bandwagon which intimidates free political debate in SDS the way that some Black hustlers have sought to racist-bait other radicals into accepting their positions as gospel.

Male chauvinism—perhaps a misleading term since it tends to obscure the feet that women's male chauvinist attitudes can oppress them or other women—has hurt the radical movement. Many potentially radical women are unwilling to join an organization which they believe is indifferent to women's oppression, It is a fact that a good number of the ersatz, crackpot and separatist tendencies in the existing women's liberation groups are a reaction to the male chauvinism in the student movement. These groups blur over class lines and stress "individual liberation" and other Utopian schemes.

Many of the women who do enter radical politics tend to play supportive roles and are not encouraged to develop politically or exercise leadership. SDS must rid itself of male chauvinism and utilize the full talents of all its members.

VI. SDS and Special Groups

It is not enough to fight individual aspects of women's oppression within the labor movement and in SDS. Separate women's liberation groups offer an opportunity to tie together all aspects of women's oppression in the minds of their members, and hence to suggest a single solution—which is socialism. As Marxists, we recognize that special oppression calls for special defensive and combative organizations of the oppressed. For this reason, SDS should give critical support (determined by program) to Black groups which fight the special oppression of Black people; similarly SDS should support women's groups which fight on the basis of a Marxist program for the special needs of women.

Armed with a more developed political and economic analysis of society, SDS members should be able to win the more serious groups away from petty-bourgeois amateur therapy sessions, liberalism, female separatism and vicarious anti-male terrorism, to a working-class perspective. Women's liberation groups are a good arena for winning militant 'women over to SDS and to socialism.

VII. Program for Women's Liberation

When SDS members make a political entry into a special group such as a women's liberation group, they should be armed with a program that raises consciousness by relating specific felt needs to the broader struggle for socialism. We carry through this program by raising a series of transitional demands—that is, demands which flow from the specific struggle but which lead the struggle to a higher level of militancy and political
sophistication.

We move that SDS accept the following program for struggle and agitate around the following demands:

For the abolition of family restrictions;

1. Abolition of abortion laws; each woman must be free to make her own decisions.

2. Free abortions, as part of demand for free quality medical care for everybody, so poor women will have the same freedom of choice as middle-class women.

3. Freely available birth control devices and information.

4. Free full-time child-care facilities for all children, the expenses to be borne by the employer or the state. Free pre-natal, maternity and post-natal care with no loss in pay for time off.

5. Establishment of free voluntary cafeterias in the factories and other places of work.

6. Divorce at the request of either partner. Abolition of alimony. Expenses for children to be paid by the state.

7. Lower the legal age of adulthood to 16. State stipend for schooling or training for any child who wishes to leave home. Free education for all children, with housing, food and stipend. No loco parentis. Student-teacher-worker control of all schools and colleges.

To fight the super-exploitation of women workers:

8. Full and equal pay for equal work.

9. Equal work: equal access to all job categories. Shorter work week with no loss in pay ("30 for 40") to eliminate unemployment at the capitalists* expense.

To fight male chauvinism:

10. An end to all forms of discrimination—legal, political, social and cultural.

SDS should seek the creation of a non-exclusionist class-conscious women's liberation organization in which SDS members can participate and struggle on the basis of the above program. Toward this end, we should direct interested SDS members to seek to initiate, along with other radical women, a nationally-oriented women's liberation publication.

*From The Pages Of The “Workers Vanguard” Archives-“The Fight for Women’s Liberation”

Click on the headline to link to the article from “Workers Vanguard” described in the title.


Markin comment:

As almost always these historical articles and polemics are purposefully helpful to clarify the issues in the struggle against world imperialism, particularly the “monster” here in America.

From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-For Free, Safe Abortion on Demand!

Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011

Democrats, Republicans Attack Women’s Rights

For Free, Safe Abortion on Demand!

For decades Democrats, liberals and feminists have offered up one concession after another that have whittled away abortion rights and emboldened the anti-abortion bigots, who have in turn launched a renewed legislative offensive. In state after state, Republican politicians have introduced bills aiming to eliminate abortion rights, while reactionary “right to life” outfits have launched a vicious campaign against Planned Parenthood to further limit access to abortion.

The attacks have not just come from crazed right-wing Republican politicians intent on reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Not long after Roe, the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976 under Democratic Party president Jimmy Carter, excluded abortion from federal health care services provided to low-income people. Obama’s health care “reform” was in line with the Hyde Amendment, which eliminated abortion coverage from Medicaid. Many often vote for the Democratic Party largely on the basis that it would defend Roe v. Wade in the courts. But, as one concession after another has been made, including restricting late-term abortions, pro-Democratic outfits such as the National Organization for Women have limited their actions to “fight the right” electoral tactics even as abortion rights continue to be axed.

Already, at least 38 states have “fetal homicide” laws. In Utah, women can be charged with criminal homicide for obtaining an illegal abortion or inducing a miscarriage, including through “reckless” behavior. The law was prompted by the tragic case of a desperate 17-year-old who paid a man to beat her in the hopes of inducing a miscarriage. Anti-abortion bigots are now looking to replicate a Nebraska law that virtually bans all abortions at 20 weeks after conception. Across the country, bills are being introduced to force women seeking abortions to view ultrasounds of the fetus—as is already the law in Oklahoma—and to ban any abortion coverage by private insurance companies. In Georgia, a Republican state legislator has introduced a bill that would make abortion the legal equivalent of murder and force the criminal investigation of women who suffer miscarriages. In South Dakota and Nebraska bills were introduced to allow the use of “justifiable homicide” as a defense for the murder of abortion providers.

Through violence, intimidation and bipartisan legal assaults, the legal right to abortion in the U.S. is severely constricted. If you live in one of the many areas where no providers exist, you have little “choice,” unless you have the time and money to travel. Some 87 percent of U.S. counties and 31 percent of metropolitan areas have no abortion services. The panoply of anti-abortion laws and restrictions on birth control particularly targets young, working-class and poor women. The wealthy will always get their medical care, including abortions, whether legal or not.

Seeking to further curtail access to abortion, anti-woman bigots are now targeting Planned Parenthood, which provides essential medical services of all kinds especially to young, working-class and minority women; one in five women will use Planned Parenthood sometime in her life. Scandal-mongering videotapes made by “Live Action,” a reactionary anti-abortion outfit, portrayed a man and woman posing as a pimp and young prostitute seeking health services including abortion, showing them receiving advice from Planned Parenthood workers in various locations. Stirring up the sex panic ever roiling the surface of American politics, the videos set off a wave of Puritanical vapors and hand-wringing, as intended, including among supposed defenders of women’s rights.

Planned Parenthood’s response to this sting operation was cringing. Amy Woodruff, manager of their Perth Amboy, New Jersey, clinic, did her job, giving common-sense advice to the people in the video. This included reassurances of confidentiality, how to evade legal complications and useful health tips (like only “waist up” sexual activity for two weeks after an abortion). But amid the furor, Planned Parenthood fired her, setting a dangerous precedent for others who may need such advice in the future. There is now at least one bill before Congress calling to bar government funding to Planned Parenthood. For our part, we agree with the gossip Web site Gawker’s February 4 headline: “Even Teen Hookers Need Abortions.” We call for the abolition of all laws against “crimes without victims,” which include drug use and prostitution. We oppose “squeal rules” and all other restrictions on abortion directed at minors.

The anti-Planned Parenthood scam recalls the operation launched by right-wing yahoos against the liberal community organizing group ACORN, whose main “crime” was to register poor people and minorities to vote. Despite its close ties to the Democratic Party, Democrats joined with Republicans in voting to defund it, leading to its dissolution.

At its most extreme, bloody and reactionary, the anti-abortion campaign has meant the murder of abortion providers, such as Dr. George Tiller in 2009. Dr. Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, Kansas, now closed, was one of only three in the entire country that provided late-term abortions. Between 1993 and 1998 anti-abortion terrorists murdered seven people for providing abortions: Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida, in 1993; Dr. John Britton, along with a clinic escort, in Pensacola a year later; Lee Ann Nichols and Shannon Lowney at a clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1994; a security guard in a 1998 Birmingham, Alabama, firebombing that also severely wounded a nurse; and Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo, New York, killed by a sniper outside his home in 1998.

The organized labor movement has every interest in fighting for the rights of women. Such a struggle must be waged independently of all capitalist parties as part of the fight for free, quality health care for all, as well as for free, 24-hour childcare, which would address the deep class and racial oppression of poor and minority women. For free abortion on demand!

War on Women, War on Workers

It is no accident that anti-woman attacks have escalated at the same time that the ruling class has undertaken a vicious union-busting offensive, seeking to get rid of nearly every “overhead” associated with the most minimal social safety net. Not only abortion rights, but also funding for medical research, family planning and reproductive health care services for women are being slashed to the bone. This includes the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers and infants each month. Likewise, there are proposals to slash grants for prenatal heath care to low-income women—cuts proposed in various degrees by both capitalist parties. The late, great comedian George Carlin, who famously quipped that “not every ejaculation deserves a name,” caught the hypocrisy of abortion opponents: “They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own.”

In such a climate, the recent scandal over a West Philadelphia clinic throws a light on the wretched “services,” such as they exist, that many poor people get. Two women died and many more were mutilated in botched abortion procedures by one Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his ill-trained staff, according to a January Philadelphia grand jury report. Officials had ignored medical complaints about the clinic since at least 1993, and it hadn’t been inspected by health officials for 16 years. Filthy and dangerous, the clinic was, according to the grand jury report, responsible for many injuries to women, including infections and perforated bowels and uteruses.

The state, of course, has gone after Gosnell for performing late-term abortions—abortion after 24 weeks is a crime in Pennsylvania. He is being charged with eight counts of murder, seven of them for aborting late-term fetuses, which should be no crime. It is the anti-woman laws and desperate conditions that force poor, black and immigrant women into such squalid back-alley operations. In the Mantua neighborhood of West Philadelphia, where Gosnell’s operation was located, over 16,000 people live below the poverty line. In all of West Philadelphia, the infant mortality rate resembles that of a Third World country: 15 per 1,000 live births. This is more than double the national rate, which is itself the highest rate of the 33 countries that the New York Times (26 February) described as having “advanced economies.” In West Philly, low birth weight is a major problem. For the women living there, abortion—normally a simple procedure that is safer than childbirth—is not always safe, not always legal and certainly not affordable. Many women have trouble getting the money together quickly, and young women especially are often pounded with guilt by repressive parents, violent boyfriends or hellfire preachers, so they end up having their abortions only at the last moment.

Religious scam artists ply their trade not only in the evangelical Christian bible belt. In Manhattan recently, a Texas-based group called “Life Always” put up a billboard about a half-mile from a Planned Parenthood facility. As part of its national campaign targeting minority neighborhoods, the billboard showed the picture of a little black girl with the grotesque message: “The most dangerous place for African Americans is in the womb.” The billboard went up on February 22; two days later, it was taken down, having outraged much of the city, not least the black populace. Life Always’ pastor, Stephen Broden, ranted: “The survival of our country, our nation is tied to the woman’s womb! And if we are assaulting that womb, if we are attacking that womb, we are on a path to self-destruction!” Such is the repulsive pathology of these bigots, to whom women are destined to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen forever.

Lord knows that Obama rarely passes up the opportunity to reaffirm his credentials as a true believer in the Christian faith. Covering for him, the reformist International Socialist Organization wrote an article on the West Philly case, “Like Roe Never Happened” (Socialist Worker, 25 January), that roundly denounced the right for its attacks on abortion rights but made not one mention of President Obama or the Democratic Party.

For Women’s Liberation Through International Socialist Revolution!

Tens of thousands of women across the world die each year from illegal abortions. Some researchers estimate that in Latin America and the Caribbean the primary cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 39 is complications from illegal abortions. Poverty and backwardness, enforced around the globe by imperialist domination, mean that the infrastructure necessary to bring basic medical care, contraception and abortion to Third World women is simply not there. Nor will it ever be, short of the destruction of the capitalist system by victorious working-class revolution and the establishment of proletarian state rule. It is precisely the hold of religious obscurantism, anti-homosexual bigotry and the treatment of women as simply the bearers of—and those responsible for rearing—the next generation that must be eradicated by laying the material basis for the full equality of the sexes.

The fight for women’s liberation is a necessary part of the struggle for the emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed masses throughout the world. The main source of women’s oppression is the institution of the family. As we noted in our article, “Fifty Years After the Pill: Still a Long Way to Go” (WV No. 968, 5 November 2010):

“The war on abortion rights has become a spearhead for social and political reaction because at its heart lies the question of legal and social equality for women. Providing women with some control over whether or not to have children, abortion is viewed as a threat to the institution of the family….

“The capitalist class seeks to buttress the family, which, along with organized religion and the state, form a triad that props up the exploitation of labor. To free women from their deeply entrenched special oppression will take a workers revolution to rip this system of exploitation out by the roots and replace it with a workers government to begin the construction of a socialist world.”

Referring to the early Soviet workers republic, Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, wrote in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): “The revolutionary power gave women the right to abortion, which in conditions of want and family distress, whatever may be said upon this subject by the eunuchs and old maids of both sexes, is one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights.” It is this vision of socialist freedom that we continue to stand on today.

From The Marxist Archives-On Communist Work Among Women in Soviet Central Asia

March Is Women's History Month- Every Month Is Communist History Month

Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011

On Communist Work Among Women in Soviet Central Asia

From the Archives of Marxism

March 8 marks International Women’s Day. In honor of that proletarian holiday, we print below excerpts from a report by Varsenika Kasparova titled “Forms and Methods of Work Among the Women of the Soviet East.” The report was published in a 1924 Communist Party of Great Britain pamphlet called Work Among Women.

By sweeping away the capitalist order throughout the tsarist empire, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution drastically changed the lives of women. In overwhelmingly Muslim Soviet Central Asia, the Bolsheviks faced the enormous task of overthrowing pre-feudal and tribal social and economic relations that were inextricably linked to the virtual enslavement of women. Bringing the peoples from these backward regions over to the side of revolution could only happen to the extent that they understood that the transformation of society—to which they themselves would contribute—was in their own interest.

The Zhenotdel (the Bolshevik Party’s Department of Working Women and Peasant Women) sent Bolshevik cadre across the Steppe to bring the vision of socialist emancipation to Muslim women and draw them actively into the work. Zhenotdel organizers and educators at times even donned the paranja (head-to-toe veil) in order to meet with these women. They faced threats from every sort of counterrevolutionary tendency, and both they and the brave women they worked with faced violence and death. By 1924, Zhenotdel organizations existed in many areas.

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution began to lay the material foundations for the liberation of women. But without the international extension of the revolution, especially to the advanced capitalist countries, the material basis for the elimination of scarcity and its attendant oppressions could not be realized. The pressure of imperialist encirclement, the devastation of the working class during the Civil War and the lengthy isolation of the Russian Revolution enabled a bureaucratic layer headed by Stalin to usurp political power in a political counterrevolution in 1923-24. Beginning then, the people who ruled the USSR, the way the USSR was ruled and the purposes for which the USSR was ruled all changed. In 1930, the Soviet government liquidated the Zhenotdel. After decades of Stalinist misrule, capitalist counterrevolution triumphed in 1991-92, a world-historic defeat for the international working class and for the women of the former Soviet Union.

Varsenika Kasparova was co-director of the Zhenotdel with longtime Bolshevik cadre Alexandra Kollontai. She also headed the Agitational Department of the All-Russian Bureau of Military Commissars, whose teams she deployed throughout Trotsky’s Red Army. Of Tatar origin, Kasparova was responsible for the countries of the East in the Communist International’s International Women’s Secretariat (IWS). She was prominent in Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which fought the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union, including while she held her post in the IWS. In 1941, she was executed in a Stalinist prison.

* * *

THE Soviet Government, having announced the most complete and thorough-going programme the world has ever known for the abolition of all forms of oppression of man by man, was not content with mere formal proclamations, but took immediate measures for their execution. Thus, in dealing with the question of nationalities, the Soviet Government not only proclaimed the equality of all nationalities living within the Soviet borders, but took practical steps to make them equal in fact. Since equality is only possible among nations which have attained the same level of economic, cultural and political development, the first step along this line was, of necessity, immediate assistance to the most backward nations in order to raise them to the level of development that had been attained by the more progressive peoples. Under the special conditions of the Soviet Union, particular attention had to be paid to the people living in the Eastern border countries where the colonial policy of the Tsar, resulting in the artificial retention of whole nations in a primitive state, had brought about the most disastrous results. The main forces had, therefore, to be diverted to the Eastern borders—the weakest section of the national front. The Soviet Government was faced with a great historical task in the East. First there was the problem of developing and quickening the economic life, of replacing the prevailing primitive forms of agriculture and cattle-breeding with more modern methods, and of building up local industrial centres capable of quickly shaking off the survivals of feudalism. Then came the problem of raising the cultural level of the working masses, of waging an energetic campaign against such relics of barbarism as polygamy, religious prejudices, ancient customs, and the purchasing of wives. Parallel with this, it was necessary to familiarise the population with the elements of culture, to abolish illiteracy, to reform their social life and finally to undertake the task of the Communist education of the workers.

But the execution of all these measures, leading to the complete liberation of the backward peoples of the East, is inextricably bound up with the question of the liberation of the Oriental women who are still incomparably more enslaved and oppressed than men. The debased position of the women of the East, which is an outrage to human dignity, is directly due to the fact that the Eastern women take no part in productive labour and are confined entirely to the subsidiary labour of the home and the care of the family. Economically helpless, the Eastern woman is completely at the mercy of her husband or her father, who are the absolute masters of her fate. Her world is limited to the bedroom, the kitchen, and the children, and thus the woman becomes sluggish and passive, a drag on every forward movement.

The backwardness of the women of the Eastern countries is the main obstacle in the road not only of the reorganisation of family and social relationships, but of the economic structure. And without that fundamental change there can be no thought of the awakening of the East. In view of these conditions, the first task is to release the suffering women of the East from the grip of ancient social forms and religious prejudices in which she is held, and help her to stand on her feet and enjoy those rights guaranteed to her by Soviet law. No matter how difficult this task appears, we cannot wave it aside or put it off until tomorrow, for without the liberation of the women, the abolition of national oppression is impossible. Moreover, the emancipation of Eastern women will mean an increase in the productivity of labour in Russia as well as the broadening and reinforcing of the social basis on which the Communist Party depends in its constructive work. Although incapable of grasping the meaning and substance of Bolshevism mentally, the toiling women of the East, awakening to the new life, cannot but instinctively sympathise with the Communists for the very reason that they belong to the most oppressed class of society and they are drawn involuntarily into the struggle for liberation, carrying with them all the passion of one who but yesterday was a slave. For all these reasons the work among the Eastern women occupies a unique position, and the question of the apparatus directing the work, the conditions under which it is carried on, and the forms and methods employed, require particular attention. The Working Women’s Department serves as the apparatus for organising the toiling women of the East on the basis of their economic interests, aiding in their cultural development and attracting them into Soviet and party life....

With all the heroic efforts of the Women’s Department, it is impossible as yet to train a sufficient number of workers from among the masses of working women to carry on all the work that is necessary among the hundreds of thousands of unenlightened women of the East. Only if the work among the Eastern women is recognised as the problem of the party as a whole, and if the working women’s department is able, through the Press and special reports at non-party peasant conferences, to develop sufficiently widespread agitation among the male population of the East, shall we have the required conditions for developing the work, or, more exactly, an apparatus capable of directing the work.

But the mere presence of a working apparatus does not necessarily ensure the success of its activities. This depends on whether the task is approached correctly, and whether the forms and methods chosen are practicable.

A certain amount of experience has already been accumulated, in relation to both these particular questions, enabling us to select those ways and means which have already been proved applicable to the unique conditions we have in the East. The first thing to bear in mind is that the work of the Women’s Department must not be confined to working women employed in the factories, but should be carried on among women engaged in home industries, women peasants and housekeepers. And in every case special attention should be paid to young girls, for they are especially good material both for educational propaganda work and as prospective members of various kinds of organisations....

In organising work in the Eastern borderlands we must not for one moment forget that every one of these national republics and regions represents a separate world, with its own customs and habits determined by its isolated economic life. In adapting themselves to these special conditions, the Women’s Department workers must avoid equally any survival of the imperialistic attitude toward the border regions, with its contempt for special national needs and mistrust of the native workers, and any tendencies in the direction of local Chauvinism, finding expression in an exaggeration of local needs to the detriment of the interest of the Union of Soviet Republics as a whole....

First of all, we shall consider those methods directed toward the economic liberation of women. In this sphere measures must be used for raising the qualifications of women’s labour, for combating unemployment and for the organisation of industrial artels [cooperative associations]. With the aim of acquainting the working women of the East with industrial methods, special trade and factory schools have been organised. In certain cases these schools are conducted with women’s clubs and schools....

But the measures described represent only one side of the activities of the Women’s Department. Side by side with its efforts to raise the cultural level of the women of the East, the Women’s Department is carrying on the extensive work of implanting the elements of culture in the minds of the Eastern Women, and attracting them into community work. The methods used in this work are many and various. First of all, as a means of combating the high mortality and social diseases so prevalent in the national republics, and the various ancient customs physically disabling women and children, the Women’s Department has organised a chain of medical stations, maternity homes, children’s consultations, creches, etc., and is carrying on a wide propaganda of sanitation and hygienic information. Special attention is also directed to such survivals of barbarism as the marriage of minors, the wearing of veils, the binding of women in childbirth, etc. In addition to these forms of direct help to the backward population of the Eastern borderlands, instituted by the organs of the Commissariat of Health, the Department for the Protection of Mothers and Infants, and the Commissariat of Social Insurance, the Women’s Department has devoted no less attention to the combating of national ignorance. Along with the various medical and children’s institutions, the Women’s Department has tried to develop a chain of educational institutions. Special efforts have been made in the direction of liquidating illiteracy and in increasing the attendance of girls at the Soviet schools....

As experience has proved in Azerbaidjan, the women’s clubs attain great popularity and hold great promise for development among the Eastern women. One inestimable advantage of the clubs is that they attract even the most backward and apathetic women, who are unconsciously drawn into community work, and thus the influence of the club is extended far beyond its circle of membership....

No small part in supporting the work of the educational institutions is played by the Press. Nine newspapers are published in the Soviet East which contain special pages devoted to the needs of the working women of the East. In Turkestan a special paper for women is published, and in Azerbaidjan and Georgia there are two women’s journals, Jenshina Na Vostok (The Woman of the East) and Nash Put (Our Path). All of these organs are printed in the native language so that the local women may understand them.

Another form of cultural activity which should be noted is the question of women’s rights. The first task of the Women’s Department in this field is to inform the native population of the decrees of the Soviet Government establishing complete equality of the sexes, the protection of mothers and infants, and the protection of women in industry. The second task is to stimulate the women to make use of the rights which have been secured to them and to draw them into work in the capacity of assessors, advocates, judges, etc., with the aim of doing away with all the barbaric survivals in the realm of women’s rights and position. The best means of attaining this, in addition to widespread propaganda through the Press and platform, is through the organisation of a series of legal bureaux connected with the clubs or the Women’s Department, to which women may turn for advice and protection in cases of infringement of their rights by their husbands or fathers; the arrangement of special public trials from time to time and the staging of mock trials for the consideration of matters connected with the local convention of marriage and family relations.... This work must, however, be preceded by a certain amount of political education. The institution of delegates is the instrument for carrying on political education among the wide non-party masses of women. The women delegate meetings should bring together the working women, the peasant women and the housekeepers, and at the present time when the solution of the national question requires the forming of ties with the peasants of the national minorities, the work among the peasant women of the countries of the East must be given first consideration....

The chief task of the delegate meetings both in the separate political campaigns and in the general non-party conferences is to draw the women into the government, trade union, co-operative and party structure. The Women’s Department endeavours to have women included on the election tickets to all Soviet organs, and particularly to the village Soviets, the volost Congresses, the Volost Central Executive Committees, and the town Soviets. With the aim of increasing the activities of the members elected to the Soviets the Women’s Department should bring up at their meetings questions having to do with the family, and the social and economic position of the Oriental women. Those delegates who are not members of the Soviet must be urged to participate in the discussions on these questions.

In addition to drawing the women of the East into government organs, it is also necessary to increase the activities of women in trade unions, and to attract the peasant and proletarian women into consumers’ co-operatives.

It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of the phase of the work of the Women’s Department that has just been indicated. The participation of Oriental women in active, constructive work will advance the Communist movement just as far as their backwardness and apathy have held it back. Furthermore, the practical work in Soviet institutions and social organisations means the gradual separation of the most conscious and dependable women from among the backward women of the East, and these women swell the ranks of the Communist Party and increase the number of active builders of the new life. And among the remaining masses, the work in the capacity of delegates or practical workers serves to awaken them to the decrepit condition of the Oriental social forms and customs, which is the first step to their complete support of the activities of the Soviet government. Not until all the hundreds of thousands of women in the East have been thus awakened, can our work among them be considered successful. Under present conditions the work among the Eastern women occupies a very prominent place. The attention of all the enemies and friends of Soviet Russia in other countries is rivetted on this work. The former observe the awakening of the East with alarm, but the latter are carefully noting the ways and means applied by the Communist Party in order to make use of the experience of the Russian Communist Party in their own countries, after the imperialistic and colonial system has been brought to an end.

*Those Who Fought For Our Communist Future Are Kindred Spirits- Honor Lucy Parsons

Click on the title to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for anarchist leader, and wife of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons honored here in her own right.

This is a repost of a January 2009 entry in honor of Lucy Parsons as a class struggle leader. Here she is honored as an outstanding leader of the women's movement as well.

March Is Women's History Month

Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Leibknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices.

Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.

*Honor International Women's Day-A Workers' Holiday

Click on title to link to "A History In Words and Images Of International Women's Day".

This is a repost of a commentary for International Women's Day 2007

COMMENTARY

MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH-MARCH 8TH IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

MARCH 2007 (WESTERN DATES) MARKS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA STARTED ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY BY WOMEN TEXTILE WORKERS AND OTHER WOMEN DEMANDING BREAD AND PEACE, AMONG OTHER ISSUES DURING THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR I.

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the journal Women and Revolution in 1975

"Under the lead of the Third International, the day of the working women shall become a real fighting day; it shall take the form of practical measures which either solidify the conquests of Communism ...or prepare the way for the dictatorship of the working class."
-
Alexandra Kollontai (early Bolshevik leader)

Bourgeois feminists may celebrate it, but March 8 —International Women's Day—is a workers' holiday. Originating in 1908 among the female needle trades workers in Manhattan's Lower East Side, who marched under the slogans "for an eight hour day," "for the end of child labor" and "equal suffrage for women," it was officially adopted by the Second International in 1911.

International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women's oppression and the program for emancipation.

The following year the Bolsheviks not only agitated for International Women's Day in the pages of Pravda (then publishing under the name Put' Pravdy), but also made preparations to publish a special journal dealing with questions of women's liberation in Russia and internationally. It was called Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), and its first issue was scheduled to appear on International Women's Day, 1914.

Preparations for the holiday were made under the most hazardous conditions. Shortly before the long-awaited day the entire editorial board of Rabotnitsa— with one exception—as well as other Bolsheviks who had agitated for International Women's Day in St. Petersburg factories, were arrested by the Tsarist police. Despite these arrests, however, the Bolsheviks pushed ahead with their preparations. Anna Elizarova —Lenin's sister and the one member of the editorial board to escape arrest—single-handedly brought out the first issue of Rabotnitsa on March 8 (or, according to the old Russian calendar, February 23) as scheduled. Clara Zetkin, a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and in the international working women's movement, wrote:

"Greetings to you on your courageous decision to organize Women's Day, congratulations to you for not losing courage and not wanting to sit by with your hands folded. We are with you, heart and soul. You and your movement will be remembered at numerous meetings organized for Women's Day in Germany, Austria, Hungary and America."

—Quoted in A. Artiukhina, "Proidennyi Put',"
Zhenshehina v revoliutsii

By far the most important celebration ever of International Women's Day took place in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers of that city led a strike of over 90,000 workers—a strike which signaled the end of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. One week afterward, Pravda commented:

"The first day of the revolution—that is the Women's Day, the day of the Women Workers' International. All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on their day."


As the position of Soviet women degenerated under Stalin and his successors, as part of the degeneration of the entire Soviet workers state, International Women's Day was transformed from a day of international proletarian solidarity into an empty ritual which, like Mother's Day in the United States, glorifies the traditional role of women within the family.

But International Women's Day is a celebration neither of motherhood nor sisterhood; to ignore this fact is to ignore the most significant aspects of its history and purpose, which was to strengthen the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. Unlike the pre-war Mensheviks who wanted to conciliate the feminists of their day by limiting the celebration of International Women's Day to women only, the Bolsheviks insisted that it be a holiday of working women and working men in struggle together. As Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife and life-long political companion) wrote in the lead article of the first issue of Rabotnitsa:

"That which unites working women with working men is stronger than that which divides them. They are united by their common lack of rights, their common needs, their common condition, which is struggle and their common goal.... Solidarity between working men and working women, common activity, a common goal, a common path to this goal—such is the solution of the 'woman' question among workers."

We look forward to celebrating future International Women's Days not only through the dissemination of propaganda, but also through the initiation of the full range of activities traditionally associated with this proletarian holiday—general strikes, insurrections, revolution!

In Honor Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Founding of The Communist International-From The Communist International Archives-Leon Trotsky's 1921 Speech To The Second World Conference Of Communist Women

Leon Trotsky
The First Five Years of the Communist International
Volume 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Speech Delivered at the Second World
Conference of Communist Women

COMRADES! We are now convening your Conference of Communist Women and the current Congress of the Communist International – we are now convening and carrying on our work at a moment which does not seem to have that definitiveness, that clarity and those graphic fundamental features which appeared, at first sight, as the distinguishing traits of the First World Congress when it met directly following the war. Our enemies and our opponents are even saying that we have been completely and utterly mistaken in our calculations. We Communists had supposed and hoped, so say our opponents, that the world proletarian revolution would break out either during the war or immediately afterwards. But now the third year since the war is already ending, and while during this interval many revolutionary movements have taken place, it is only within one country, namely, in our own economically, politically and culturally backward Russia, that the revolutionary movement has led to the dictatorship of the proletariat – a dictatorship which has been able to maintain itself to the present day and which I hope will continue to maintain itself for a long time to come. In other countries the revolutionary movements have led only to the replacement of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg regimes by bourgeois regimes, in the form of bourgeois republics. Finally, in a whole number of countries the movement ebbed away in strikes, demonstrations and isolated uprisings which were crushed. In general, the mainstays of the capitalist regime have been preserved throughout the whole world, with the sole exception of Russia.

From this our enemies have drawn the conclusion that since capitalism hasn’t collapsed as a result of the World War in the course of the first two to three postwar years when the balance sheets were being drawn, it follows that the world proletariat has demonstrated its incapacity, while, conversely, world capitalism has demonstrated its capacity and power to retain its positions, to reestablish its equilibrium.

And at this very moment the International is discussing the question: Will the period immediately ahead, the next few years, entail the reestablishment of capitalist rule on new and higher foundations? or will it entail a mounting assault by the proletariat upon capitalism, an assault which will bring about the dictatorship of the working class? This is the fundamental question for the world proletariat and, consequently, also for its women’s section. Of course, Comrades, I can’t even attempt here to give a complete answer to this question. The time at my disposal is too brief. I shall attempt to do this, as assigned by the ECCI, at the Congress. But one thing, I believe, is completely clear to us, to Communists, to Marxists. We know that history and its movement are determined by objective causes but we also know that history is accomplished by human beings and through huthan beings. The revolution is accomplished through the working class. Essentially history thus poses the question before us in the following way: Capitalism prepared the World War; the World War erupted and destroyed millions of lives and billions of dollars’ worth of national wealth. It has shaken everything. And here on this half-ruined foundation, two basic classes are locked in struggle – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie seeks to restore capitalist equilibrium and its class rule; the proletariat seeks to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie.

It is impossible to settle this matter with pencil in hand, like adding up a list of groceries. It is impossible to say: History has taken a turn toward the reestablishment of capitalism. It is only possible to say that if the lessons of the entire preceding development – the lessons of the war, the lessons of the Russian Revolution, the lessons of the semi-revolutions in Germany, Austria and elsewhere – if these lessons go for nought, if the working class once again agrees to keep its neck within the capitalist yoke, then, perhaps, the bourgeoisie will be able to restore its equilibrium, by destroying the civilization of Western Europe and by transferring the center of world development to America, to Japan, to Asia. Entire generations would have to be destroyed in order to create this new equilibrium. To this end the diplomats, the military men, the strategists, the economists, the brokers of the bourgeoisie are now directing all their efforts. They know that while history has its profound causes, it is nonetheless made through human beings, through their organizations and through their parties; and, consequently, our Congress and your Women’s Conference have gathered here precisely in order to introduce into this unsettled historical situation the certainty of the consciousness and the will of the revolutionary class. This is the gist of the moment through which we are living and herein is the gist of its tasks as well.

We can say that the assumption of power no longer appears so simple a matter as it did to many of us two or three years ago. On the world scale this business of conquering power is extremely difficult and complicated. One must be aware that within the proletariat itself there are diverse layers, diverse levels of historical development and even diverse temporary interests. All this inevitably makes itself felt in its own due time. Layer after proletarian layer is drawn into the revolutionary struggle, passes through its own school, burns its fingers, retreats to the rear. They are followed by another layer, in whose wake comes still another and all of them are not drawn in simultaneously but at different periods; they pass through the kindergarten, the first, the second, and other grades of revolutionary development. And to combine all this into a unity – ah, this is a colossally difficult task! The example of Germany has already shown us this. There, in Central Germany, that section of the proletariat which prior to the war was the most backward and the most devoted to the Hohenzollerns, that section has today become the most revolutionary and dynamic.

The same thing happened in our country when the most backward proletarian section – the Ural proletariat – owing to a whole number of causes became at a certain moment the most revolutionary. They underwent a major inner crisis. And on the other hand, turning back to Germany, let us take for example the advanced workers of Berlin and Saxony who entered upon the road of the revolution early, and immediately succeeded in burning their fingers; not only did they fail to take power, but they suffered a defeat and have therefore since then become much more cautious. At the same time the workers’ movement in Central Germany, a very revolutionary movement which began with such great enthusiasm – this movement failed to coincide with the movement of those workers who were much more highly developed, but who were more cautious and, in some ways, more conservative. From this example alone you can already see, Comrades, how difficult it is to combine the disparate manifestations among workers of different trades and on different levels of development and culture. In the progress of the world labor movement, women proletarians play a colossal role. I say this not because I am addressing a women’s conference but because sheer numbers indicate what an important part the woman worker plays in the mechanism of the capitalist world – in France, in Germany, in America, in Japan, in every capitalist country ... Statistics inform me that in Japan there are many more women than men workers; and consequently, if the data at my disposal is credible, in the labor movement of Japan they, the proletarian women, are destined to play the decisive role and to occupy the decisive place. And generally speaking, in the world labor movement the woman worker stands closest precisely to the section of the proletariat represented by the miners of Central Germany to whom I have just referred; that is, that section of labor which is the most backward, the most oppressed, the lowliest of the lowly. And just because of this, in the years of the colossal world revolution this section of the proletariat can and must become the most active, the most revolutionary, and the most initiative section of the working class.

Naturally, mere energy, mere readiness to attack are not enough. But at the same time history is filled with instances such as these: that during a more or less protracted epoch prior to the revolution, within the male section of the working class, especially among its more privileged layers, there accumulates excessive caution, excessive conservatism, too much opportunism and over-much adaptivity. And the reaction to their own backwardness and degradation which is evinced by women, that reaction, I repeat, can play a colossal role in the revolutionary movement as a whole. There is added reason to believe that we have at present come up against a kink in history, a temporary stoppage. Three years after the imperialist war capitalism remains in existence. This is a fact. This stoppage shows how slowly the object lessons of events and facts make their impress upon human minds, upon the psychology of the masses. Consciousness lags tardily behind the objective events. We see this before our very eyes. Nevertheless the logic of history will cut its way through to the consciousness of the woman toiler both in the capitalist world and in the Asiatic East. And once again it will be the task of our Congress not only to reaffirm anew but also to formulate factually and precisely that the awakening of the toiling masses in the East is today an integral part of the world revolution, just as much so as the rising of the proletarians in the West. And the reason for it is this: If English capitalism, the most powerful capitalism in weakened Europe, has succeeded in maintaining itself, it is precisely because it rests not alone on the scarcely revolutionary English workers, but also upon the inertia of the toiling masses of the East.

In general and on the whole, despite the fact that events are unfolding much more slowly than we had expected and wished, we can say that we have grown stronger in the interval since the First World Congress. True enough, we have shed certain illusions, but by way of compensation we have taken note of our mistakes and have learned a few things; and in place of illusions we have acquired a clearer perception. We have grown up; our organizations have become stronger. Nor have our enemies wasted this interval. All this goes to show that the struggle will be fierce and hard. This struggle sums up the significance of the work of your conference. Henceforth woman will be to a far lesser degree than ever in the past a “sister of mercy,” in the political sense of the term, that is. She will become a far more direct participant on the main revolutionary battlefront. And that is why from the bottom of my heart, even if somewhat tardily, I hail your Women’s World Conference and cry out together with you: Long Live the World Proletariat! Long Live the Women Proletarians of the World!

July 15, 1921

*Honor International Women's Day- A Workers' Holiday

Click on title to link to "A History In Words and Images Of International Women's Day".

This is a repost of a commentary for International Women's Day 2008

COMMENTARY

MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH-MARCH 8TH IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

MARCH 2009 (WESTERN DATES) MARKS THE 92TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA STARTED ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY BY WOMEN TEXTILE WORKERS AND OTHER WOMEN DEMANDING BREAD AND PEACE, AMONG OTHER ISSUES DURING THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR I.

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the journal "Women and Revolution" in 1975

"Under the lead of the Third International, the day of the working women shall become a real fighting day; it shall take the form of practical measures which either solidify the conquests of Communism ...or prepare the way for the dictatorship of the working class."
-
Alexandra Kollontai (early Bolshevik leader)

Bourgeois feminists may celebrate it, but March 8 —International Women's Day—is a workers' holiday. Originating in 1908 among the female needle trades workers in Manhattan's Lower East Side, who marched under the slogans "for an eight hour day," "for the end of child labor" and "equal suffrage for women," it was officially adopted by the Second International in 1911.

International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women's oppression and the program for emancipation.

The following year the Bolsheviks not only agitated for International Women's Day in the pages of Pravda (then publishing under the name Put' Pravdy), but also made preparations to publish a special journal dealing with questions of women's liberation in Russia and internationally. It was called Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), and its first issue was scheduled to appear on International Women's Day, 1914.

Preparations for the holiday were made under the most hazardous conditions. Shortly before the long-awaited day the entire editorial board of Rabotnitsa— with one exception—as well as other Bolsheviks who had agitated for International Women's Day in St. Petersburg factories, were arrested by the Tsarist police. Despite these arrests, however, the Bolsheviks pushed ahead with their preparations. Anna Elizarova —Lenin's sister and the one member of the editorial board to escape arrest—single-handedly brought out the first issue of Rabotnitsa on March 8 (or, according to the old Russian calendar, February 23) as scheduled. Clara Zetkin, a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and in the international working women's movement, wrote:

"Greetings to you on your courageous decision to organize Women's Day, congratulations to you for not losing courage and not wanting to sit by with your hands folded. We are with you, heart and soul. You and your movement will be remembered at numerous meetings organized for Women's Day in Germany, Austria, Hungary and America."

—Quoted in A. Artiukhina, "Proidennyi Put',"
Zhenshehina v revoliutsii

By far the most important celebration ever of International Women's Day took place in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers of that city led a strike of over 90,000 workers—a strike which signaled the end of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. One week afterward, Pravda commented:

"The first day of the revolution—that is the Women's Day, the day of the Women Workers' International. All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on their day."


As the position of Soviet women degenerated under Stalin and his successors, as part of the degeneration of the entire Soviet workers state, International Women's Day was transformed from a day of international proletarian solidarity into an empty ritual which, like Mother's Day in the United States, glorifies the traditional role of women within the family.

But International Women's Day is a celebration neither of motherhood nor sisterhood; to ignore this fact is to ignore the most significant aspects of its history and purpose, which was to strengthen the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. Unlike the pre-war Mensheviks who wanted to conciliate the feminists of their day by limiting the celebration of International Women's Day to women only, the Bolsheviks insisted that it be a holiday of working women and working men in struggle together. As Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife and life-long political companion) wrote in the lead article of the first issue of Rabotnitsa:

"That which unites working women with working men is stronger than that which divides them. They are united by their common lack of rights, their common needs, their common condition, which is struggle and their common goal.... Solidarity between working men and working women, common activity, a common goal, a common path to this goal—such is the solution of the 'woman' question among workers."

We look forward to celebrating future International Women's Days not only through the dissemination of propaganda, but also through the initiation of the full range of activities traditionally associated with this proletarian holiday—general strikes, insurrections, revolution!

*In Defense Of Whimsy- In Honor Of Ms. Beatrix Potter

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of "Miss Potter" trailer for the film.

DVD REVIEW

March Is Women’s History Month

Miss Potter, starring Rene Zellweger, Mansfield Studios, 2007

Frankly, in the mist of time back to the days of my childhood, I was both fearful and delighted by the stories and illustrations of the famous English children's' book writer and illustrator who is the subject of this film, Ms. Beatrix Potter. Perhaps it was fear of the size of the animals in the editions that I would receive from a great aunt. Or because that aunt was poor but thoughtful it might have been the black and white illustrations in the editions that I received. (I was rather startled to see in this film that her work during her lifetime, at her fervent request to her publishers, was done in multi-colors.) Be that as it may be there are a couple of points that I want to make about this very interesting and well-acted film (particularly by Rene Zellweger as Ms. Potter) which on the face of it would seem outside the parameters of the kind of thing that would interest me and the kinds of subjects that I tend to write about in this space.

I am not sure how faithfully the creators of this film were to the biography of Ms. Potter's life, however, for my purpose that is neither here nor there. The story line here concerns (aside from the various romantic interests which a commercial film seemingly cannot do without even with accomplished middle class educated women like Ms. Potter or Ms. Jane Austen) the public flowering of the her story telling and illustrative talents under the guidance of a member of her publishing company (and eventual doom-struck lover) in early 20th century England.

That, of course, is a feat worthy of recognition in and of itself as this is the height of the Victorian period in that country. Her pluck and fortitude as she runs up against the ill wishes of her middle class but very class conscious parents (particularly dear Mrs. Potter) is one of the themes that drive this film. Another is the fate of a thirty-two year old unmarried woman who, moreover, is not concerned about being married if it interferes with her chances for artistic success. Fair enough, but Mother England (to speak nothing of Mother Potter) does not approve.
Finally, this film is a nice look at the fate of the creative artist who is in searching for her self-expression faces at least some condescension for being, merely, a children's' book writer (especially when she could be a ...wife and mother).

Those are the interesting themes presented in this film. The way that Ms. Potter struggles and perseveres to become an independent person with her own resources and navigate her own course through life is another in a now long series of female "uplift" films. This one is a worthy addition to that genre. As to the downside of Ms. Potter's story. The period under discussion was one of great social turmoil in England. This is, after all, the heyday of the women's suffragette movement led by the like of Sylvia Pankhurst (and her sister and mother) and of the emergence of a British Labor party led by Keri Hardie as well as other social experiments. There is no sense in this film that Ms. Potter was aware of such movements or much interested in them.

No one expects an artist, a creative artist to boot, per se to devote their talents for the greater good of their society in a political way. However it helps. Ms. Potter did begin to display a little of that consciousness toward the end of the movie, after she broke from her family and set on her own course, and set up independently in the country and attempted to preserve her Lake District surroundings. But rather than belabor that point let me end with this thought. When we fight for and get a more just society than we have now then maybe there will be time and space enough for a thousand thousand Beatrix Potters to flourish. Until then watch this film and do not be afraid to read her little books with those little animal drawings.

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Juliet Mitchell On Freud And Marx-"Pyschoanalysis And Feminism"- A Book Review (March 1975)

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
March Is Women's History Month

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FEMINISM by Juliet Mitchell. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, $8.95 hardcover, 456 pp.

A Review by Ed Clarkson

The pioneering theories of Sigmund Freud have engendered stormy controversy in scientific, literary and political circles ever since their embryonic formulation around the turn of the century. The birth of the psychoanalytic movement was attended by a split between co-workers Freud and Breuer, and dissension was frequently to beset the developing psychoanalytic school as many of Freud's collaborators and followers rejected central tenets of his theories—the role of the unconscious, the importance of sexuality and its energizer libido, and the critical significance of the Oedipus conflict in personality development.

Likewise in the communist movement heated debates have raged over the validity of Freudianism as a science of human behavior. As a consequence of the growing bureaucratic degeneration of the backward and isolated Soviet workers state, Freudian theory came under attack in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920's from both Stalinist-Bukharinist bureaucratic philistines in the party and the intelligentsia following Pavlov, whose ideas had the dual advantage of being more ostensibly materialistic and having a Russian origin—no small consideration for the proponents of ^"socialism in one country."

Marxism vs. Freudianism?

It was the embattled Trotsky who insisted against the vulgar materialists that Freudian psychoanalytic theory required attentive consideration. In a 1926 essay on culture and socialism, which is breathtaking in its brilliance, Trotsky evaluates Freud as follows:
"The school of the Viennese psychoanalyst Freud proceeds in a different way [than Pavlov]. It assumes in advance that the driving force of the most complex and delicate of psychic processes is a physiological need. In this general sense it is materialistic, if you leave aside the question whether it does not assign too big a place to the sexual factor at the expense of others, for this is already a dispute within the frontiers of materialism.

But the psychoanalyst does not approach problems of consciousness experimentally, going from the lowest phenomena to the highest, from the simple reflex to the complex reflex; instead, he attempts to take all these intermediate stages in one jump, from above downwards, from the religious myth, the lyrical poem, or the dream, straight to the physiological basis of the psyche....

"The attempt to declare psychoanalysis 'incompatible' with Marxism and simply turn one's back on Freudian-ism is too simple, or, more accurately, too simplistic. But we are in any case not obliged to adopt Freudianism. It is a working hypothesis that can produce and undoubtedly does produce deductions and conjectures that proceed along the lines of materialist psychology."

Psychological theories conflict with dialectical materialism when they attempt to demonstrate that human beings are innately incapable of organizing society in such a manner that would qualitatively advance their material conditions of existence. For instance, Robert Audrey's theory of territoriality and Konrad Lorenz' theory of aggression are counterposed to Marxism precisely because they set out to prove that human cooperation beyond the narrow limits established by class, particularly capitalist, society is impossible.

There is a historical fatalism to be found in Freud's thought, especially in his pessimistic post-WWI writings, in which Thanatos (the death wish) hovers over a self-immolating humanity. Because Freud's petty-bourgeois world view does intrude upon his effort to formulate a scientific theory .of behavior, many in the working-class movement regard Freudianism with hostility.

In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) Freud declares that the possibilities • for human satisfaction and happiness are "limited from the start by our constitution," and "the natural human aversion to work gives rise to the most difficult social problems." The abolition of private property would "in no way alter the individual difference in power and influence." Commenting on a by then Stalinized Soviet Union, Freud confirms his skepticism by accepting the bureaucracy's claims of "socialist" society:

"The Russian Communists, too, hope to be able to cause human aggressiveness to disappear by guaranteeing the satisfaction of all material needs and by establishing equality in other respects among all members of the community. That, in my opinion, is an illusion. They themselves are armed to-day with the most scrupulous care and not the least important of the methods by which they keep their supporters together is hatred of everyone beyond their frontiers." -"Why War?," Collected Papers, Vol. 5

Freud and Feminism

While his views on Marxism and the Soviet Union brought Freud denunciation by the Stalinists and fellow-traveling intellectuals, His theories of femininity similarly evoked considerable antipathy from "feminists. For Freud, two themes were of "paramount importance" in analysis: "the wish for a penis in women and, in men, the struggle against passivity [toward other men]... “("Analysis Terminable and Interminable^ *° Collected Papers Vol. 5). To feminists this theory of penis envy seemed to doom women td the status of biological second-class citizenship—men in wish, but not in being.

In the context of the general anti-Marxist and anti-Freudian biases of New Left feminism, the "socialist-feminism" of Juliet Mitchell's first book, Woman's Estate (1971), appeared as a left bulge in "Movement" feminism. A quasi-Marxist and a "scientific" Freudian, Mitchell argued that Marxism was both relevant to the liberation of women (which it certainly is) and in harmony with the feminist "principle" of women" organizing separately as women (which it is not). Woman's Estate even criticized, albeit mildly, the implications of the anti-Leninist basis of New Left feminism:
"Feminist consciousness will not \// 'naturally' develop into socialism, nor should it. If we simply develop feminist consciousness (as radical feminists suggest) we will get, not political consciousness, but the equivalent of national chauvinism among Third World nations or economist!) among working-class organizations."

The penchant of American behaviorist psychologists to focus on "antisocial" behavior, recently expressed in the extreme by Skinner's apologetics for a benevolent totalitarianism, has prompted the radical petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, yesterday sympathetic to the "progressive" pragmatism of Skinner's Walden II, to search elsewhere for a psychological justification for their liberalism. Much in vogue in the feminist milieu have been the humanist psychology of Maslow, the hyper-genital theories of Reich and the "schizophrenia-is-good-for-you" ravings of Laing.

Debunking Reich and Laing

Juliet Mitchell's most recent book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, is an 1 attempt to come to terms with a declining movement which has become hardened in its anti-Marxism, anti-Freudianism and virulent bourgeois feminism. By this time, the reconciliation attempted in Woman's Estate between an eclectic Marxism, Freudianism and anti-capitalist feminism had obviously become untenable. Something had to give; it was Juliet Mitchell's "Marxism."

For those who prefer Freud to his detractors, Psychoanalysis and Feminism will prove, at least in part, an eminently satisfying work. Mitchell presents an intelligent and for the most part accurate exposition of the core elements of Freudian theory, especially the analysis of femininity. This is combined with insightful critiques of the "radical psychotherapists" Reich and Laing and of Freud's feminist critics, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Germaine Greer, Shoal-Smith Firestone and Kate Millet.

Mitchell argues convincingly that most criticisms of psychoanalysis are based on a misunderstanding of an important distinction in Freudian psychology: the distinction between the psychic representation of the conflict of social reality with instinctual forces (the data of psychoanalysis) and the biological instincts themselves. Freud fully realized that he was dealing only with the former; the latter he regarded as the subject of investigation for a future, more advanced science.

Reich asserts the matter in more "basic" terms: the repression of sexual energy is bad, its "ultimate" orgasmic expression good; heterosexual genitality is natural, homosexuality unnatural; the vagina is thus the biological counterpart of the penis. Lost are Freud's insights into the inherently bisexual natural of human sexual development and the extent to which the conflict between human drives and social reality both shape (through sublimation) and distort happiness and role. For Reich, instinct is all. Similarly, where Freud analyzes both normal and abnormal behavior as manifested through the a-logical operations of the unconscious, Laing sees the delusional world of the schizophrenic as a logical response to a current conflict. For Laing, humans are simply reactive.
Although Mitchell is frequently brilliant and incisive in her defense of the "science" of psychoanalysis, she is disquieted by Freud's insistence that all understanding of behavior, in the final analysis, must be grounded on the bedrock of biology. In Mitchell's schema biological determinism has no place, and her uneasiness with its presence in Freudian theory leads her to distort precisely that area of Freudianism she is most concerned to defend—his hypotheses concerning the "psychological consequences of the anatomical distinction between the sexes."

Freudianism and the Oppression of Women

Generally Freud carefully distinguishes between the psychological impact of biological factors and the factors themselves. When Freud takes up the problem of the psychological development of women, however, he sidesteps this distinction.
Freud posits that the fear of castration for males is caused not merely by the sight or conception of penisless beings (women), but in addition by an actual, although perhaps implied, threat of castration. The female case is different:

"A momentous "discovery which little girls are destined to make [is that] they notice the penis of a brother or playmate, strikingly visible and of larger proportions, at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall a victim to envy for the penis.... A little girl... makes her judgment and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without and wants to have it." (our emphasis)

— "Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes," Collected Papers, Vol. 5

For Freud, the esteem for the penis is established not socially, but phylo-genetically: "The penis (to follow Ferenczi) owes its extraordinarily high narcissistic cathexis to its organic significance for the propagation of the species" (ibid.). The penis is valorized because of its role in reproduction.

Although the clitoris is "analogous to the male organ," Freud regards the vagina as the "true female organ" (Female Sexuality). Freud thus considers women as constitutionally inferior to men.

Freud's error is a logical one, based, no doubt, on the intrusion of male chauvinist assumptions into his scientific thinking. His letters to his wife are1 adequate testimony to his susceptibility to such influences. They reek of sexism, although of the icky-poo, "women-as-the-salt-of-the-earth" variety. Mitchell's aversion to Freud's biologicisms, however, is motivated not by political opposition to their anti-feminist implications, but by the desire for an idealistic revision of psychoanalysis which could provide the long-sought feminist "answer" to Marxist dialectical materialism.

Mitchell Contra Engels
In Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Mitchell sweeps aside the self-proclaimed Marxist orientation of Woman's Estate and poses anew the, "fundamental question of the cause of women's oppression:

"The longevity of the oppression of women must be based on something more than conspiracy, something more complicated than biological handicap and more durable than economic exploitation (although in differing degrees all these may feature)."

The missing link turns out to be "culture"; specifically, patriarchal culture:
"It seems to be the case that contemporary anthropology supports Freud's contention that human society in many ways equals patriarchy rather than Engels' notion that patriarchy can be limited to strictly literate civilization."

Using the anthropological theories of academic doyen Claude Levi-Strauss, Mitchell argues that since the exchange of women by men between kinship groupings (exogamy) has characterized all human societies, all human society has been patriarchal, i.e., "fathers not men" have "determinate power." The Oedipus complex now becomes for Mitchell the internalized manifestation of the cultural tyranny represented in the incest taboo. With the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, "man finally enters into his humanity."

Mitchell realizes that kinship systems are obviously neither operative nor relevant in modern capitalist society and therefore maintains that the bourgeois nuclear family is socially redundant, merely "created to give that law [the patriarchal law] a last hearing." The struggle against the oppression of women no longer must be directed against capitalism or even the "domination of men," but must become a "struggle based on a theory of the social non-necessity at this stage of development of the laws instituted by patriarchy."

This contention that fathers have "determinate" power flies in the face of the fact that their role in anthropologically earlier (avuncular) societies was not significantly greater than the mother's. Nor is the father's son prohibited from copulating with the father's wife (the Oedipus complex as understood by Freud), although biological mother-son sexual relationships have apparently generally been taboo. The most primitive societies seldom have mechanisms for identifying either the father’s sons or his mates (i.e., the nuclear family).

Incest (the prohibition of heterosexual copulation between certain biologically related individuals) only imperfectly correlates with the more primitive forms of unilinearity (kinship determined by membership to either the mother's or the father's clan) and exogamy (marrying out of one's clan). The incest taboo as such is a more recent historical development associated with increasingly differentiated social arrangements and the rise of the monogamous family.

Completely absent from Mitchell's analysis is any sense why the "law of patriarchy" should endure. Basing his hypothesis on inadequate anthropological data (Morgan's studies), Engels wrongly inferred that a matriarchal stage preceded the development of patriarchy. But the essence of Engels' method, however, is the appreciation of the role of social relationships (the emergence of private property) in causing a qualitative perforation of the condition of women. Mitchell draws her analysis, however, from Freud's unfounded, fanciful hypothesis that in the dawn of primitive society exogamy and the incest taboo resulted from the successful alliance of sons against the sexual privileges of the all-powerful father, which resulted in the cannibalization of the father and the sharing out of his women.

Forward to the Pages of Ms.

Psychoanalysis and Feminism thus floats above any concern for the actual oppression of women. The degradation suffered by women imprisoned within the nuclear family and oppressed by capitalist society simply becomes the equivalent perforce of men exchanging women. Prostitution, social isolation, divestiture of legal rights, sole responsibility for child raising—all features of the monogamous nuclear family noticeably absent in most primitive societies —recede in importance for Juliet Mitchell. The bourgeois nuclear family is "not in itself important. V Rather, it is the kinship system, which "in our society... barely can be seen to regulate social relationships," that is the source of women's oppression, because "it is within kinship structures that women, as women, are situated"!

Mitchell has accomplished an idealist subversion of even that rudimentary Marxist understanding revealed in Woman's Estate. Now she conceptualizes culture as having its own dynamic (exactly what, remains unstated) and being transmitted through the unconscious independent of material conditions. Mitchell now recognizes "two autonomous areas: the economic mode of capitalism and the ideological mode of patriarchy."

In Woman's Estate Mitchell envisioned the revolution as the product of a coalition of oppressed groups, each raising its consciousness of its own particular oppression by a theoretical operation-bootstrap and then working to a point of solidarity. From her revised perspective, Mitchell has come to consider even a tactical unity between the women's liberation movement and the labor movement as unnecessary:

"Because patriarchy is by no means identical with capitalism the successes and strengths of the two revolutionary movements [the women's liberation movement and the working-class movement] will not follow along neatly parallel paths."

Not only are these paths not "neatly parallel," but they may in fact diverge. Mitchell readily admits that "It is perfectly possible for feminism to make more gains under social democracy than it does in the first years of socialism." Indeed, if capitalism has already rendered women's oppression redundant, then it is difficult to explain why the liberation of women could not occur under any form of capitalist government, from reformist Laborism or the popular front to fascism. In fact, the most optimum conditions could well be a fascism where there are sufficiently strong drives toward racial purity as to necessitate the challenging of the "utility" of the incest taboo.

The politics of Psychoanalysis and Feminism are a justification for "Movement” feminism at any of its-stages, from the radical, anti-capitalist; New Left period through its current trivial, careerist and venal expression. For Juliet Mitchell the battle against cultural oppression no longer need be waged in the streets; the need for a Popular Front against Patriarchy can 'be propagated with equal efficacy from the pages of MS.