Monday, August 24, 2015

Once Again- Stop The Damn Wars- Stop The Damn American And Allied Bombings In Syria And Iraq

Once Again- Stop The Damn Wars- Stop The Damn American And Allied  Bombings In Syria And Iraq- Stop The Damn American Killer Drone Attacks Everywhere- Stop The Saudi Bombing Decimation Of Yemen-Stop The American Military Aid To Israel- Hell, Just Stop The Madness In The Middle East 



 
 
 
 
 
 


Late one night in 2014 Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton had been sitting at a bar in Boston, Jack Higgin’s Grille, down a few streets from the financial district toward Quincy Market talking about various experiences, political experiences in their lives as they were wont to do these days since they were both mostly retired. Ralph having turned over the day to day operation of his specialty electronics shop in Troy, New York to his youngest son as he in his turn had taken over from his father Ralph, Sr. when he had retired in 1991 (the eldest son, Ralph III, had opted for a career as a software engineer for General Electric still a force in the local economy although not nearly as powerful as when Ralph was young and it had been the largest private employer in the Tri-City area) and Sam had sold off his small print shop business in Carver down about thirty miles south of Boston to a large copying company when he had finally seen a few years before the writing on the wall that the day of the small specialty print shop specializing in silk-screening and other odd job methods of reproduction was done for in the computerized color world.

So they had time for remembrances back to the days in the early 1970s when they had first met and had caught the tail-end of the big splash 1960s political and social explosion that stirred significant elements of their generation, “the generation of ’68” so-called by Sam’s friend from New York City Fritz Jasper although neither of them had been involved in any of the cataclysmic events that had occurred in America (and the world) that year. Sam had that year fitfully been trying to start his own small printing business after working for a few years for Mr. Snyder the premier printer in town and he was knee-deep in trying to mop up on the silk-screen craze for posters and tee shirts and had even hired his old friend from high school Jack Callahan who had gone to the Massachusetts School of Art as his chief silk-screen designer, and later when he moved off the dime politically his acting manager as well. Ralph’s excuse was simpler, simplicity itself for he was knee-deep in the big muddy in the Central Highlands of Vietnam trying to keep body and soul together against that damn Charlie who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Occasionally over the years Ralph would come to Boston on trips at Sam’s invitation and they almost always would go have a few at Jack Higgin’s during his stay talking mainly family matters before Ralph would head back to Troy and his family but more frequently of late they would go back over the ground of their youth, would go over more that ground more than one time to see if something they could have done, or something they did not do, would have made a difference when the “counter-revolution,” when the conservative push-back reared its head, when the cultural wars began in earnest with the ebbing of that big good night 1960s explosion. Sam would return the favor by going out to Albany, or more frequently to Saratoga Springs where he, they could see who from the old days, Utah Phillips before he passed away, Rosalie Sorrels before she left the road, Ronnie Gilbert and Pete Seeger before they passed but you get the picture, the old folk minute of the early 1960s that Sam had been very interested in when he started to hang around Cambridge later in that decade, were still alive enough to be playing at the famous coffeehouse still going from the 1960s, the Café Lena, although minus founder Lena for quite a while now. Sam had never lost the bug, never lost that longing for the lost folk minute that in his mind connected in with him hanging around the Hayes-Bickford in Harvard Square on lonesome weekends nights seeing what was to be seen. Sam had dragged Ralph, who despite living on about less than an hour away had never heard of the Café Lena since he had been tuned to the AM stations playing the awful stuff that got air time after the classic period of rock went into decline and before rock became acid-tinged, along with him and he had developed a pretty fair appreciation for the music as well.         

The conversation that night in 2014 got going after the usual few whiskey and sodas used to fortify them for the night talkfest had begun to take effect had been pushed in the direction of what ever happened to that socialist vision that had driven some of their early radical political work together (in the old days both of them in these midnight gabfest would have fortified themselves with in succession grass, cocaine, speed and watch the sun come up and still be talking. These days about midnight would be the end point, maybe earlier.). The specific reason for that question coming up that night had been that Sam had asked Ralph a few weeks before to write up a little remembrance of when he had first heard the socialist-anarchist-communist-radical labor militant   international working class anthem, the Internationale, for Fritz Jasper’s blog, American Protest Music.

Sam had noted that Ralph had with a certain sorrow stated that he no longer had occasion to sing the song. Moreover one of the reasons for that absence was that  despite his and Sam’s continued “good old cause” left-wing political activism socialism as a solution to humankind’s impasses was deeply out of favor (that activism as Ralph mentioned to Sam on more than one occasion these days considerably shortened from the old frenzied 24/7 desperate struggles around trying unsuccessfully end the Vietnam War from the American side by getting the government to stop the damn thing although the Vietnamese liberation forces in the end and at great cost had had no trouble doing so).

People, intellectuals and working stiffs alike, no longer for the most part had that socialist vision goal that had driven several generations, or the best parts of those generations, since the mid-19th century to put their efforts into, did not have that goal on their radar, didn’t see a way out of the malaise through that route. Had moreover backed off considerably from that prospective since the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the early 1990s if not before despite the obvious failure of capitalism to any longer put a dent in the vast inequalities and injustices, their suffered inequalities and injustices, in the world. Sam had had to agree to that sad statement, had had to agree that they, in effect, too had abandoned that goal in their own lives for all practical purposes even though they had been driven by that vision for a while once they got “religion” in the old days in the early 1970s, once they saw that the anti-war struggle that animated their first efforts was not going to get the war-makers to stop making war.

Maybe it was the booze, maybe it was growing older and more reflective, maybe it was that Ralph’s comments had stirred up some sense of guilt for losing the hard edge of their youthful dreams but that night Sam wanted to press the issue of what that socialist prospective meant, what they thought it was all about (both agreed in passing, almost as an afterthought that what had happened, what passed for socialism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere was NOT what they were dreaming of although they gave third world liberation struggles against imperialism like in Vietnam dependent on Soviet aid plenty of wiggle room to make mistakes and still retain their support).       

Both men during the course of their conversation commented on the fact that no way, no way in hell, if it had not been for the explosive events of the 1960s, of the war and later a bunch of social issue questions, mainly third world liberation struggles internationally and the black liberation question at home they would not even be having the conversation they were having (both also chuckling a little at using the old time terms, especially the use of “struggle” and “question,” for example the  black, gay, woman question since lately they had noticed that younger activists no longer spoke in such terms but used more ephemeral “white privilege,” “patriarchy,”  “gender” terms reflecting the identity politics that have been in fashion for a long time, since the ebb flow of the 1960s). 

No, nothing in the sweet young lives of Samuel Eaton to the Carver cranberry bog capital of world in Carver (then) working-class born (his father a “bogger” himself when they needed extra help) and Ralph Morris, Junior to the Troy General Electric plants-dominated working- class born would have in say 1967, maybe later, projected that almost fifty years later they would be fitfully and regretfully speaking about the their visions of socialism and it demise as a world driving force for social change. 

Ralph and Sam had imbibed all the standard identifiable working-class prejudices against reds, some of those prejudices more widespread among the general population of the times, you know, like the big red scare Cold War “your mommy is a commie, turn her in,” “the Russians are coming get under the desk and hold onto your head,” anybody to the left of Grandpa Ike, maybe even him, communist dupes of Joe Stalin and his progeny who pulled the strings from Moscow and made everybody jumpy; against blacks (Ralph had stood there right next to his father, Ralph, Sr., when he led the physical opposition to blacks moving into the Tappan Street section of town and had nothing, along with his corner boys at Van Patten’s Drugstore, but the “n” word to call black people, sometimes to their faces and Sam’s father was not much better, a southerner from hillbilly country down in Appalachia who had been stationed in Hingham at the end of World War II and stayed, who never could until his dying breathe call blacks anything but the “n” word); against gays and lesbians (Ralph and his boys mercilessly fag and dyke baiting them whenever the guys and he went to Saratoga Springs where those creeps spent their summers doing whatever nasty things they did to each other and Sam likewise down in Provincetown with his boys, he helping, beating up some poor guy in a back alley after one of them had made a fake pass at the guy, Jesus; against uppity woman, servile, domestic child-producing women like their good old mothers and sisters and wanna-bes were okay as were “easy” girls ready to toot their whistles, attitudes which they had only gotten beaten out of them when they ran into their respective future wives who had both been influenced by the women’s liberation movement although truth to tell they were not especially political, but rather artistic.  Native Americans didn’t even rate a nod since they were not on the radar, were written off in any case as fodder for cowboys and soldiers in blue. But mainly they had been red, white and blue American patriotic guys who really did have ice picks in their eyes for anybody who thought they would like to tread on old Uncle Sam (who had been “invented” around Ralph’s hometown way).      

See Ralph, Sam too for that matter, had joined the anti-war movement for personal reasons at first which had to do a lot with ending the war in Vietnam and not a lot about “changing the whole freaking world” (Ralph’s term). Certainly not creeping around the fringes of socialism before the 1960s ebbed and they had to look to the long haul to pursue their political dreams. Ralph’s story was a little bit amazing that way, see, he had served in the military, served in the Army, in Vietnam, had been drafted in early 1967 while he was working in his father’s electrical shop and to avoid being “cannon fodder” as anybody could see what was happening to every “drafted as infantry guy” he had enlisted (three years against the draft’s two) with the expectation of getting something in the electrical field as a job, something useful. But in 1967, 1968 what Uncle needed, desperately needed as General Westmoreland called for more troops, was more “grunts” to flush out Charlie and so Ralph wound up with a unit in the Central Highlands, up in the bush trying to kill every commie he could get his hands on just like the General wanted. He had extended his tour to eighteen months to get out a little early from his enlistment not so much that he was gung-ho but because he had become fed up with what the war had done to him, what he had had to do to survive, what his buddies had had to do to survive and what the American government had turned them all into, nothing but animals, nothing more, as he told everybody who would listen. When he was discharged in late 1969 he wound up joining the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), the main anti-war veterans group at the time. Such a move by Ralph and thousands of other soldiers who had served in ‘Nam a real indication even today of how unpopular that war was when the guys who had fought the damn thing arms in hand, mostly guys then, rose up against the slaughter, taking part in a lot of their actions around Albany and New York City mainly.

Here is the way Ralph told Sam in 1971 about how he came in contact with VVAW while they had plenty of time to talk when they were being detained in RFK Stadium after being arrested in a May Day demonstration. One day in 1970 Ralph was taking a high compression motor to Albany to a customer and had parked the shop truck on Van Dyke Street near Russell Sage College. Coming down the line, silent, silent as the grave he thought later, were a ragtag bunch of guys in mismatched (on purpose he found out later) military uniforms carrying individual signs but with a big banner in front calling for immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and signing the banner with the name of the organization-Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). That was all, and all that was needed. Nobody on those still patriotic, mostly government worker, streets called them commies or anything like that but you could tell some guys in white collars who never came close to a gun, except maybe to kill animals or something defenseless really wanted to. One veteran as they came nearer to Ralph shouted out for any veterans to join them, to tell the world what they knew first-hand about what was going on in Vietnam. Yeah, that shout-out was all Ralph needed he said, all he needed to join his “band of brothers.”                               

Sam as he recalled how he and Ralph had met in Washington had remembered that Ralph had first noticed that he was wearing a VVAW supporter button and Ralph had asked if he had been in ‘Nam. Sam, a little sheepishly, explained that he had been exempted from military duty since he was the sole support for his mother and four younger sisters after his father had passed away of a massive heart attack in 1965. (He had gone to work in Mister Snyder’s print shop where he had learned enough about the printing business to later open his own shop which he kept afloat somehow during the late 1960s with Jack Callahan’s help and which became his career after he settled down when the 1960s ebbed and people started heading back to “normal.”) He then told Ralph the reason that he had joined the anti-war movement after years of relative indifference since he was not involved in the war effort had been that his closest high school friend, Jeff Mullins, had been blown away in the Central Highlands and that had made him question what was going on. Jeff, like them had been as red, white and blue as any guy, had written him when he was in Vietnam that he thought that the place, the situation that he found himself in was more than he bargained for, and that if he didn’t make it back for Sam to tell people, everybody he could what was really going on. Then with just a few months to go Jeff was blown away near some village that Sam could not spell or pronounce correctly even all these many years later. Jeff had not only been Sam’s best friend but was as straight a guy as you could meet, and had gotten Sam out of more than a few scrapes, a few illegal scrapes that could have got him before some judge. So that was how Sam got “religion,” not through some intellectual or rational argument about the theories of war, just wars or “your country right or wrong wars,” but because his friend had been blown away, blown away for no good reason as far as that went.  

At first Sam had worked with Quakers and other pacifist types because he knew they were in Cambridge where he found himself hanging out more and more trying to connect with the happenings that were splitting his generation to hell and back. They got him doing acts of civil disobedience at draft boards, including the Carver Draft Board on Allan Road the place where Jeff had been drafted from (and which created no little turmoil and threats among the Eaton’s neighbors who were still plenty patriotic at that point, his mother and sisters took some of the fire as well), military bases and recruiting stations to try to get the word out to kids who might get hoodwinked in joining up in the slaughter. As the war dragged on though he started going to Cambridge meetings where more radical elements were trying to figure out actions that might stop the damn war cold and that appealed to him more than the “assuming the government was rational and would listen to reason” protest actions of those “gentile little old ladies in tennis sneakers.”

1971 though, May Day 1971 to be exact is, where these two stories, two very different stories with the same theme joined together. Sam at that point in 1971 was like Ralph just trying to get the war ended, maybe help out the Panthers a little but before May Day had no grandiose ideas about changing the “whole freaking world.” Sam had gone down to Washington with a group of Cambridge radicals and “reds” to do what he could to shut down the war under the slogan-“if the government does not shut down the war, we will shut down the government.” Ralph had come down with a contingent of ex-veterans and supporters from Albany for that same purpose. Sam and Ralph had as a result met on the bizarre football field at RFK Stadium which was the main holding area for the thousands of people arrested that day (and throughout the week)

So May Day was a watershed for both men, both men having before May Day sensed that more drastic action was necessary to “tame the American imperial monster” (Sam’s term picked up from The Real Paper, an alternative newspaper he had picked up at a street newsstand in Cambridge) and had come away from that experience, that disaster, with the understanding that even to end the war would take much more, and many more people, than they had previously expected. Ralph, in particular, had been carried away with the notion that what he and his fellow veterans who were going to try to symbolically close down the Pentagon were doing as veterans would cause the government pause, would make them think twice about any retaliation to guys who had served and seen it all. Ralph got “smart” on that one fast when the National Guard which was defending the Pentagon, or part of it that day, treated them like any Chicago cops at the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, treated them like cops did to any SDS-ers anywhere, and like anybody else who raised their voices against governmental policy in the streets.

Ralph told Sam while in captivity that he still worked in his father’s shop for a while but their relationship was icy (and would be for a long time after that although in 1991 when Ralph, Senior retired Ralph took over the business). He would take part in whatever actions he could around the area (and down in New York City a couple of times when they called for re-enforcements to make a big splash).

Ralph has like he said joined with a group of VVAW-ers and supporters for an action down in Washington, D.C. The idea, which would sound kind of strange today in a different time when there is very little overt anti-war activity against the current crop of endless wars but also shows how desperate they were to end that damn war, was to on May Day shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. Their task, as part of the bigger scheme, since they were to form up as a total veterans and supporters contingent was to symbolically shut down the Pentagon. Wild right, but see the figuring was that they, the government, would not dare to arrest vets and they figured (“they” meaning all those who planned the events and went along with the plan) the government would treat it somewhat like the big civilian action at the Pentagon in 1967 which Norman Mailer won a literary prize writing a book about, Armies of the Night. Silly them. 

They after the fall-out from that event were thus searching for a better way to handle things, a better way to make an impact because those few days of detention in D.C. that they had jointly suffered not only started what would be a lifelong personal friendship but an on-going conversation between them over the next several years about how to bring about the greater social change they sensed was needed before one could even think about stopping wars and stuff like that. (The story in short of how they got out of RFK after a few days was pretty straight forward. Since law enforcement was so strapped that week somebody had noticed and passed the word along that some of the side exits in the stadium were not guarded and so they had just walked out and got out of town fast, very fast, hitchhiking back north to Carver, and Ralph later to Troy). Hence the push by Sam toward the study groups led by “red collectives” that were sprouting up then peopled by others who had the same kind of questions which they would join, unjoin and work with, or not work with over the next few years before both men sensed the tide of the rolling 1960s had ebbed. 

Old time high school thoughts even with the cross-fire hells of burned down Vietnam villages melted into the back of his brain crossed his mind when Ralph thought of Marx, Lenin (he, they, were not familiar with Trotsky except he had “bought it” down in Mexico with an icepick from some assassin), Joe Stalin, Red Square, Moscow and commie dupes. Sam had not been far behind in his own youthful prejudices as he told Ralph one night after a class and they were tossing down a few at Jack’s in Cambridge before heading home to the commune where Sam was staying.

Ralph had gone out of his way to note in that blog entry for Fritz that before he got “religion” on the anti-war and later social justice issues he held as many anti-communist prejudices as anybody else in Troy, New York where he hailed from, not excluding his rabidly right-wing father who never really believed until his dying days in 2005 that the United States had lost the war in Vietnam. Ralph had realized that all the propaganda he had been fed was like the wind and his realization of that had made him  a very angry young man when he got out of the Army in late 1969. He tried to talk to his father about it but Ralph, Senior was hung up in a combination “good war, World War II, his war where America saved international civilization from the Nazis and Nips (his father’s term since he fought in the Pacific with the Marines) and “my country, right or wrong.” All Ralph, Senior really wanted Ralph to do was get back to the shop and help him fill those goddam GE defense contract orders. And he did it, for a while.

Ralph had also expressed his feelings of trepidation when after a lot of things went south on the social justice front with damn little to show for all the arrests, deaths, and social cataclysm he and Sam had gotten into a study group in Cambridge run by a “Red October Collective” which focused on studying “Che” Guevara and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky after an introduction to the Marxist classics. Sam who was living in that commune in Cambridge at the time, the summer of 1972, had invited Ralph to come over from Troy to spent the summer in the study group trying to find out what had gone wrong (and what they had gotten right too, as Sam told him not to forget), why they were spinning their wheels trying to change the world for the better just then and to think about new strategies and tactics for the next big break-out of social activism. At the end of each meeting they would sing the Internationale before the group broke up. At first Ralph had a hard time with the idea of singing a “commie” song (he didn’t put it that way but he might as well have according to Sam) unlike something like John Lennon’s Give Peace A Chance, songs like that. As he, they got immersed in the group Ralph lightened up and would sing along if not with gusto then without a snicker.

That same apprehensive attitude had prevailed when after about three meetings they began to study what the group leader, Jeremy, called classic Marxism, the line from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A couple of the early classes dealt with the American Civil War and its relationship to the class struggle in America, and Marx’s views on what was happening, why it was necessary for all progressives to side with the North and the end of slavery, and why despite his personal flaws and attitudes toward blacks Abraham Lincoln was a figure to admire all of which both men knew little about except the battles and military leaders in American History classes. What caused the most fears and consternation was the need for revolution worked out in practice during the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. They could see that it was necessary in Russia during those times but America in the 1970s was a different question, not to speak of the beating that they had taken for being “uppity” in the streets in Washington, D.C. in 1971 when they didn’t think about revolution (maybe others had such ideas but if so they kept them to themselves) and the state came crashing down on them.    

The biggest problem though was trying to decipher all the various tendencies in the socialist movement. Ralph, maybe Sam more so, though if everybody wanted the same thing, wanted a better and more peaceful system to live under then they should all get together in one organization, or some such form. The split between the Social Democrats and the Communists, later the split between Stalinists and Trotskyists, and still later the split between Stalinists and Maoists had their heads spinning, had then thankful that they did not have to fight those fights out.

All in all though they had the greatest respect for Trotsky, Trotsky the serious smart intellectual with a revolver in his hand. Had maybe a little sympathy for the doomed revolutionary tilling against the windmills and not bitching about it. Maybe feeling a little like that was the rolling the rock up the hill that they would be facing. That admiration of Trotsky did not extend to the twelve million sects, maybe that number is too low, who have endlessly split from a stillborn organization he started when he felt the Communist International had stopped being a revolutionary force, the Fourth International. Sam brought up a Catholic would make Ralph laugh when he compared those disputes to the old time religious disputes back in the Middle Ages about how many angels would fit on the tip of a needle. They, after spending the summer in study decided that for a while they would work with whoever still needed help but that as far as committing to joining an ongoing organization forget it. 

At the beginning in any case, and that might have affected his ultimate decision, some of Ralph’s old habits kind of held him back, you know the anti-red stuff, Cold War enemy stuff, just like at first he had had trouble despite all he knew about calling for victory to the Viet Cong (who in-country they called “Charlie” in derision although after Tet 1968 with much more respect when Charlie came at them and kept coming despite high losses). But Ralph got over it, got in the swing. 

The Marxism did not come easy, the theory part, maybe for Ralph a little more than Sam who had taken junior college night classes to bolster the small print shop he had built from nothing after Mister Snyder moved his operation to Quincy to be nearer his main client, State Street Bank and Trust (although for long periods his old Carver friend, Jack Callahan, managed the place when Sam was off on his campaigns). They got that the working-class, their class, should rule and be done with inequalities of all kinds but the idea of a revolution, or more importantly, a working class party which was on everybody’s mind in those days to lead that revolution seemed, well, utopian. The economic theory behind Marxism, that impossible to read Das Capital and historical materialism as a philosophy were books sealed with seven seals for them both. Nevertheless for a few years, say until 1975, 1976 when the tide really had ebbed for anybody who wanted to see they hung around with the local “reds,” mostly those interested in third world liberation struggles and political prisoner defense work. Those were really the earnest “socialist years” although if you had asked them for a model of what their socialism looked like they probably would have pointed to Cuba which seemed fresher than the stodgy old Soviet Union with their Brezhnev bureaucrats.

After that time while they would periodically read the left press and participate any time somebody, some group needed bodies for a rally, demonstration, some street action they would be there in their respective hometowns that they both eventually filtered back to. Then 2002 came and the endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and seemingly a million other places drove them to drop their “armed truce” (Sam’s term picked up by Ralph) with society and return to the streets , return with an almost youthful vengeance. They would see young people at the rallies hocking their little Marxist papers, maybe buy one to read a home but that flame that had caused them to join study groups, to work with Marxist-oriented “red collectives,” to read books that were hard to fathom had passed, had passed just as socialism as a way to end humankind’s impasses had fallen out of favor once the Soviet Union and its satellites had gone up in a puff of smoke.

Then the endless wars came Iraq I (old man Bush’s claim to fame) although too short to get Ralph and Sam off their couches, Serbia, the big flare-ups in the Middle East name your country of the day or week where the bombs, United States bombs no matter the disguise of some voluntary coalition of the “willing.” The thing that galled Ralph though was the attempts to do war “on the cheap” with killer-drones in place of humans and war materials. The gall part coming from the fact that despite the new high-tech battlefield each succeeding President kept asking for “boots on the ground” to put paid to the notion that all the technology in the world would not secure, as he knew from painful experience in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the ground which needed to be controlled. So the grunts would have to be rolled out and the drones, well, the drones would just keep like all bombs, manned or unmanned, would keep creating that damn collateral damage.    

So the wars drove them back to the streets as “elders” but then things like the Great Recession (really depression except for the rich who did not fallout of high office buildings this time like in 1929) and the quicksilver minute response of the Occupy movement where they spent much time for the short time the movement raised its head publically.

More troubling recently had been the spate of police brutality cases and murders of young black men for being black and alive it seemed. Ralph and Sam had cut their teeth in the movement facing the police and while they were not harassed as a matter of course except when they courted the confrontations they did know that the cops like a lot of people think, a lot of people in the movement too, were nobody’s friends, should be treated like rattlesnakes. Every fiber of their bones told them that from about high school corner boy days. Still how were a couple of old white guys with good hearts going to intersect a movement driven by young mostly black kids who were worried about surviving and who for the most part were not political. They both longed for the days when the Black Panthers could get a hearing from that crowd about self-defense but also about the dirty role of the cops in keeping the ghetto army of occupation in full force.  

Everywhere they went, to each demonstration, rally, vigil, speak-out they would see a new cohort of the young earnest Marxist-types hocking their newspapers and leaflets. Sam thought one time, maybe more than one time, that maybe those earnest kids with their wafer-thin newspapers will study the classics and make more sense out of them than Sam and Ralph could. As for Sam and Ralph they would now just keep showing up to support the “good old cause.”              




Here is what Sam had to say recently about the endless wars that were disturbing his sleep these days with the carnage and pillage:
 
For a very long time, a very long time it seems now since the first days that  I started looking to the Russian revolutions of 1917 (the essentially embryonic stillborn one in February and the more world-historic Soviet socialist one in October) and to a somewhat lesser extent that of 1905 as historical events that anybody seriously interested in working-class centered revolution has to take the measure of I have seemingly endlessly touted the example of the Bolshevik Duma deputies (who actually resided in the workers section of that body, proving yet again the second, hell, maybe third class status of that class in Imperial Russia) in voting against the Czar’s war budgets for supplies in World War I (and winding up in Siberian exile for their troubles) as a prime example of what anti-war parliamentary representatives should do when the war drums start beating. I have also noted the examples of the Bulgarian and Serbian Social-Democrats in that war voting against their respective war budgets, and more so given the more decisive character of the betrayed of socialism by the cowardly majority of the German Social-Democrats, the valor of Karl Liebknecht in Germany in breaking with Social-Democratic Party policy of voting as a bloc in voting against the Kaiser’s war budgets also in that same war (and winding in the Kaiser’s jails for his efforts). I have argued with those in the now almost moribund anti-war movement as well as in the past starting with George McGovern in the early 1970s when I began to think through how to stop the damn wars that seem to constantly confront us in the age of the American imperium that the key to any political support to any politician is their negative vote on the war budgets. That, at times, has meant not voting for the over-all defense budget which is asking for way too much of any bourgeois political these days and would have me put away in some protective institution for my own good even by Senator Bernie Saunders of Vermont just against the specific budgets for whatever current adventure the United States government has embarked upon. You know the one hundred billion here and there each year for Afghanistan, Iraq and the odd conflict all of which by every reasonable account adds up to some serious money, over a trillion dollars at last count, drawn down the drain. That is the litmus test for any serious opposition at the parliamentary level. [Saunders who has just announced for the presidency here in America for 2016 not as an independent socialist but as some kind of animal called a “democratic socialist” running as a Democrat against Madame Clinton, one of the wings of the war party and thus no longer worthy of consideration as a candidate. His consistent votes for endless military aid to Israel in order to continue the savage suppression of the Palestinian people within and outside its borders also precludes such support.]

This, if the recent past is any example, is no abstract question these days as I wrote in February 2015 when President Obama was scratching around once again for Congressional authorization to go after ISIS and whoever else he has in his gun-sights these days. Who knows what is next if the Saudis get bogged down in Yemen, some other country becomes a “failed state” after a little off-hand American bombing and troops, somebody’s troops paid out of the U.S. mint coin of the realm. At that moment I, we, the anti-war movement was not even asking anything about saying “no” to the war budgets but for Congress to simply say “no” to another imperial adventure. That simply sane act would be a big step and even Senator Bernie Saunders of Vermont would grant me a reprieve from that institution he was about to throw me in for such a reasonable request. Let’s get to it, let’s set a fire under the Congress each time war resolutions and war budgets come to the floor and hold each and every hand to that fire on this one. Even if we have to hold our noses while doing so. 

Some of my fellow anti-war activists have argued with me about this “no support for politicians who say “yes” to war resolutions and budgets citing the “progressive” variation of the old chestnut that you must support Democrat X because despite the fact that he or she put up every hand for every war resolution and every war budget you have to support him or her because the other guys, usually Republican W, Y, Z, are so much worse, maybe wants to bomb extra countries or jack up the war budget or something. All these so-called anti-war maneuvers of supporting the “lesser evil” whether my fellows know it or not were honed into an art form in their turns by the Socialist Party whose pro and anti-war faction fights over World War I and the example of the Russian October as the most decisive anti-war action in history when they withdrew from World War I, the Communist Party when they back-handedly (and not so back-handedly when the deal went down) backed every Roosevelt action in World War II and the Socialist Workers Party who openly promoted their links to bourgeois politicians and refused to make a no on the war budget a litmus test in the Vietnam anti-war movement, the three leftwing organizations in this country that have had the minimal clout necessary to argue this point. I cannot follow that path. However I am always ready to join with the too few forces who care about such questions of war and peace to oppose whatever action the American government is taking to gear up for war, or gear up their incessant bombing, and now drone campaigns. So yes you will see me walking along with the brethren whenever the call comes out.   

Off the recent track record in the failed state of Iraq, the failed state in Libya, the nearly failed state in Syria (I am still looking for those “moderate” anti-ISIS forces that the United States is trying to supply in Syria) and also the nearly failed state in Ukraine all of which have the fingerprints of American involvement over them the beginning of wisdom is to oppose further military involvement beginning with a “no” vote to supply the damn wars. Hands Off Syria! No New War In Iraq! Stop The Bombings and Drone Attacks! Down With The Saudi Bombings In Yemen! No Military Aid to Ukraine….and that is just for starters.                 
    




       




From The Archives Of Women And Revolution

From The Archives Of  Women And Revolution


Markin comment:

The following is a set of archival issues of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month in March and periodically throughout the year.

Women and Revolution-1971-1980, Volumes 1-20  



http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/w&r/WR_001_1971.pdf

The Marxist Approach to Women’s Liberation-Communism and the Family

Workers Vanguard No. 1068
 

15 May 2015
 
The Marxist Approach to Women’s Liberation-Communism and the Family
(Women and Revolution pages)
(Part One)
 
In the Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program, the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) lays out our task of “building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international whose purpose is to lead the working class to victory through socialist revolutions throughout the world” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 54, Spring 1998). Only through the seizure of power can the proletariat end capitalism as a system and open the road to a world without exploitation and oppression. Crucial to this perspective is the fight for the emancipation of women, whose oppression goes back to the beginning of private property and cannot be eliminated short of the abolition of class society.
The Declaration explains that ultimately our goal is the creation of a new, communist society:
“The victory of the proletariat on a world scale would place unimagined material abundance at the service of human needs, lay the basis for the elimination of classes and the eradication of social inequality based on sex and the very abolition of the social significance of race, nation and ethnicity. For the first time mankind will grasp the reins of history and control its own creation, society, resulting in an undreamed-of emancipation of human potential, and a monumental forward surge of civilization. Only then will it be possible to realize the free development of each individual as the condition for the free development of all.”
It used to be that the goal of a communist society was accepted as the purpose of most tendencies calling themselves Marxist, even as they agreed on little else. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-92 this is no longer the case. The ICL alone adheres to the prospect of world communism as first put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
This “death of communism” ideological climate has resulted in the prevalence of false and narrow ideas about Marxism. In popular consciousness, communism has been reduced to economic leveling (equality at a low level of income and consumption) under state ownership of economic resources. On the contrary, the material basis for the realization of the Marxist program is the overcoming of economic scarcity through the progressive increase in the productivity of labor. This will take several generations of socialist development based on a worldwide collectivized economy to come into full being. Thus, a society would develop in which the state (a special coercive apparatus defending the ruling-class order through armed bodies of men) has withered away, national affiliation has disappeared, and the institution of the family—the main source of the oppression of women—has been replaced by collective means of caring for and socializing children and by the fullest freedom of sexual relations.
Marxism and “Human Nature”
In the past, intellectuals who considered such a society undesirable and/or impossible to attain nonetheless recognized that it was what Marxists meant by communism. For example, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), a popular exposition of his worldview, Sigmund Freud presented a brief critique of communism. There is no evidence that he had studied the works of Marx and Engels nor read those of V.I. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. His understanding (and misunderstanding) of communism was held by many European and American intellectuals of the time, whatever their political persuasions.
Freud based his critique of communism on his view that “the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man.” He concluded that the communist project of a harmonious society was contrary to human nature:
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature.... If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relations, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there.”
Freud rightly understood that in the communist vision of a future society the family will have withered away while there will be “complete freedom in sexual life.” Freud’s view was in error in that Marxists recognize that the family cannot be simply abolished; its necessary functions, especially the rearing of the next generation, must be replaced through socialized means of childcare and housework.
While Freud no longer has the ideological authority he once had, the idea that “human nature” makes a communist world impossible remains a common one, although the specific arguments may differ. Marxists, on the other hand, insist that material scarcity is what gives rise to savage scrambles over scanty resources. This is why communism is conceivable only with unprecedented material abundance, accompanied by a huge leap in the cultural level of society. It is the existence of classes, today in the form of the outmoded capitalist-imperialist order, that infests human society with brutality and violence. As Marxist author Isaac Deutscher wrote in “On Socialist Man” (1967), “Homo homini lupus [man is a wolf to man] is the battle cry against progress and socialism” for those “who operate the bogey of the eternal human lupus in the interest of the real and bloody lupus of contemporary imperialism.” [emphasis in original]
Freud himself identified “innate aggression” in sexual relations as the problem with human nature. And what of that? The social pathology associated with what Freud perceived as sexual rivalry has little reason to exist in a fully free, communal society in which sexual life is independent of access to food, shelter, education and every daily need and comfort. When the family has withered away along with classes and the state, the communal upbringing that replaces it will lead to a new psychology and culture among the people that grow up in those conditions. Patriarchal social values—“my” wife, “my” children—will vanish along with the oppressive system that spawned them. The relationship of children to one another and to the persons who teach and guide them will be many-sided, complex and dynamic. It is the institution of the family that ties sex and love to property, with anything other than the straitjacket of heterosexual monogamy branded as “sin.”
The family under capitalism is the main mechanism for the oppression of women and youth, tied with innumerable, interlocking threads to the basic operations of the “free market” economy. The family, the state and organized religion form a tripod of oppression propping up the capitalist order. In Third World countries, ingrained poverty and backwardness, promoted by imperialist domination, prescribe hideously oppressive practices like the veil, the bride price and female genital mutilation.
In advanced capitalist societies like the United States it may seem as if people’s messy lives bear more resemblance to the TV shows Modern Family or Transparent than the 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best. However, people’s personal choices are constricted by the laws, economics and prejudices of class society; this is especially true of the working class and the poor. Replacing the family with collective institutions is the most radical aspect of the communist program and will bring about the deepest, most sweeping changes in daily life, not least for children.
Our Left Opponents and the Anti-Sex Witchhunt
Today, that vision of a society without the oppressive institution of the family can no longer be found among the overwhelming majority of those who claim to stand for Marxism, socialism and the liberation of women. For the Stalinists, the anti-Marxist dogma of “socialism in one country” meant the abandonment many decades ago of the understanding that a global socialist society was necessary to achieve full human liberation, including of women; one consequence was the Stalinist rehabilitation of the oppressive family as a “socialist” mainstay. In “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006), we addressed this subject in depth.
Other putative Marxists today, some claiming to be Trotskyists, simply follow prevailing liberal (bourgeois) feminist doctrine when addressing the question of women’s liberation, implicitly upholding the institutions of the family and the capitalist state. A case in point is their loathing of the Spartacist League/U.S. and the ICL for our defense of the rights of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which advocates the legalization of consensual sex between men and boys, and others persecuted for such sexual “deviancy.” The ICL has consistently opposed government intervention into private life and demands an end to all laws against consensual “crimes without victims,” e.g., prostitution, drug use and pornography.
The howls of many radicals and feminists against NAMBLA are an expression of the “family values” pushed by bourgeois politicians and pundits. For decades, a government-sponsored anti-sex backlash has taken many forms: anti-gay bigotry, a witchhunt against day-care workers, the banning of the distribution of birth control devices and information to teens as well as the jailing of “deviants.” This reactionary onslaught was accompanied by such extra-legal terror as the bombing of abortion clinics. Much of this persecution aims to strengthen the bourgeois state in its regulation of the population and to spread panic as a diversion from the real brutality of life in this twisted, mean, bigoted, racist society.
In past articles, we have explored some of the ambiguities of sexuality in a society where the deformities of class inequality and racial and sexual oppression can lead to a lot of personal pain and ugliness. We have stated that while the abuse of children is a vicious and horrible crime, many illegal sexual encounters are entirely consensual and devoid of harm per se. The willful conflation of everything from mutual fondling of siblings to the heinous rape of an infant by an adult creates a social climate of anti-sex hysteria in which the perpetrators of real violence against children often go free. We have pointed out that the sexual proclivities of a group-living mammalian species like homo sapiens are patently ill-suited to the rigid heterosexual monogamy decreed by bourgeois morality.
As a minimum measure of defense against state persecution of youth who want to have sex (or even just “sext”), we oppose reactionary “age of consent” laws through which the state decrees some arbitrary age when sex is deemed okay, never mind that the age determined by these laws changes through the years and differs from state to state. In addressing such questions, we have our eye firmly on opposition to the capitalist state in all its efforts to reinforce and uphold the exploitative bourgeois order. This is the application to today’s conditions of our goal of full sexual freedom for all, including children and teenagers, in a communist future. This is particularly important for young adults, who today are expected to spend years after reaching puberty in the stranglehold of dependence on their parents. We call for full stipends for all students as part of our program for free, quality education for all, so that youth can be genuinely independent of their families.
In sharp contrast, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) refuses to call for the abolition of the existing age-of-consent laws. In an article titled “Youth, Sexuality and the Left,” ISO honcho Sherry Wolf brandished her pitchfork at NAMBLA supporter David Thorstad for being “the most vocal long-time defender of pederasty on the left” (socialistworker.org, 2 March 2010). She quoted from her book Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of LGBT Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2009): “It is incompatible for genuine consent devoid of the inequality of power to be given by a child to a man of 30.” Wolf’s article continues: “Adults and children do not approach each other as emotional, physical, social or economic equals in our society. Children and young teens do not have the maturity, experience or power to make truly free decisions about their relationships with adults. Without those, there can be no genuine consent.”
“Truly free decisions”? Most relationships between adults would not meet this standard for consent. Wolf is effectively handing over youth under 18 and their partners to the power of the bourgeois state. The only guideline for any sexual relationship should be that of effective consent—that is, mutual agreement and understanding by the parties involved—regardless of age, gender or sexual preference.
The ISO’s abandonment of youth to the oppressive sexual status quo reflects its accommodation to the prejudices of the capitalist order and backward attitudes in the general population. Ultimately, this comes from the ISO’s long-standing opposition to any perspective of the revolutionary mobilization of the working class to seize state power, create a workers state—the dictatorship of the proletariat—and open the road to a communist society. For the ISO, socialism is more or less the accumulated application of “democracy” to all sectors of the oppressed, the working class being seen as simply one more sector. The ISO seeks to pressure the capitalists to reform their exploitative order. Its perspective on women’s liberation reflects the same touching faith in the forces of reform.
Why Marxists Are Not Feminists
Interestingly, within the last few years the ISO has been engaged in a discussion in the pages of its newspaper, Socialist Worker, about theories of women’s liberation. This appears to be motivated by a desire to desert the organization’s previous position of opposition to feminism as a bourgeois ideology in favor of actively embracing the feminist or “socialist feminist” label. For example, in a talk at the ISO’s 2013 Socialism conference (printed in “Marxism, Feminism and the Fight for Liberation,” socialistworker.org, 10 July 2013), Abbie Bakan offered, “The theoretical claim that there is grounds for a coherent Marxist approach that is for ‘women’s liberation,’ while against ‘feminism,’ makes no sense.” (Until March of that year, Bakan was a prominent supporter of the Canadian International Socialists, political cousins of the ISO.)
The ISO’s recent, explicit theoretical embrace of “socialist feminism” is simply a different cover for the same liberal content. However, it presents us with an opportunity to restate the long-standing Marxist position on the family and to emphasize that the emancipation of women is fundamental to and inseparable from socialist revolution. Contrary to feminist ideology, full legal equality cannot overcome women’s oppression, which is deeply rooted in the family and private property.
As we have always emphasized, Marxism and feminism are long-standing political enemies. This requires some explanation. In the U.S. and elsewhere, it has become common to use the term “feminist” to describe the belief that men and women should be equal. But in addressing inequality, feminism accepts the confines of the existing capitalist society. Feminism as an ideology was born in the late 19th century, reflecting the aspirations of a layer of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women who wanted to claim their class prerogatives: property ownership and inheritance, access to education and the professions, and voting rights. Marxists seek far more than this limited idea of “gender equality.”
Marxists recognize that the liberation of women cannot take place without the liberation of the entire human race from exploitation and oppression—and that is our goal. This was spelled out well over a century ago in Woman Under Socialism (1879), a Marxist classic by August Bebel, the venerable leader of the German Social Democratic Party. In various editions, this work was read by millions of workers for generations before World War I. Its rich vision of the emancipation of women is not to be found in any of the ISO’s writings on the question:
“She chooses her occupation on such field as corresponds with her wishes, inclinations and natural abilities, and she works under conditions identical with man’s. Even if engaged as a practical working-woman on some field or other, at other times of the day she may be educator, teacher or nurse, at yet others she may exercise herself in art, or cultivate some branch of science, and at yet others may be filling some administrative function.”
Woman Under Socialism, trans. Daniel De Leon (Schocken Books, 1971)
What is especially significant about Bebel’s description of the self-fulfilling nature of work in a socialist society is that it applies equally to men. That points to the heart of why Marxism and feminism are mutually exclusive and indeed antagonistic. Feminists see the basic division in society as between men and women, while socialists recognize that male and female workers must fight together to end oppression and exploitation by the capitalist class.
Misrepresenting Marx
In its theoretical switch to “socialist feminism,” the ISO is promoting Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Haymarket Books, 2013). This book, originally published in 1983, was reissued as part of the Historical Materialism series with a laudatory introduction by two Canadian academics who are supporters of the ultra-reformist New Socialist Group. Even 30 years ago, the “socialist feminist” milieu that Vogel addressed had already dwindled to nothing. But because Vogel purports to represent a Marxist pole in the “social feminist” movement or intellectual current, it suits the ISO to champion her book today.
In the book’s introductory section, Vogel differentiates herself evenhandedly from non-Marxist feminists and non-feminist Marxists. She sets as her main task to analyze the character of women’s oppression within the structure and dynamics of the capitalist economic system. Her discussion of Marx and Engels is confused, contradictory and turgid. She primarily focuses on the relation between domestic or household labor and the generational reproduction of labor power. For Vogel, the oppression of women rests narrowly on women’s (unpaid) household labor. Explicitly stating, “The category of ‘the family’…is found to be wanting as an analytical starting point,” she ignores the broader questions of the role of the family in the oppression of women and children and its importance as a key prop of the capitalist order. The family serves to atomize the working class, propagating bourgeois individualism as a barrier to class solidarity.
While presenting a narrow understanding of women’s oppression, Vogel slanders Engels as an “economic determinist.” She simply dismisses the cultural and social sides of Engels’ rich arguments in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). To take one example, she complains that Engels “does not clearly link the development of a special sphere associated with the reproduction of labour power to the emergence of class-, or, perhaps, capitalist society.” This seems to mean that Engels does not show how the emergence of class society came to bear on women’s child rearing role. This is simply untrue.
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels describes how the family originated in the Neolithic Age as society first split into classes. Relying on the information available at the time, Engels drew heavily from the pioneering work of Lewis Henry Morgan among the Iroquois in upstate New York for an understanding of early, pre-class society. Engels described how the invention of agriculture created a social surplus that allowed, for the first time, the development of a leisured ruling class that lived off the labor of others. The family, specifically the monogamy of women, was needed to ensure the orderly transmission of property and power to the patriarch’s heirs, the next generation of the ruling class. While much more has become known of early stages of human society since Engels lived, his fundamental understanding has stood the test of time.
Vogel does not analyze the social role of the family for the working class under capitalism, where it is the means to raise the next generation of wage slaves. In Capital, Marx explained that the cost of labor power is determined by the cost of the maintenance and reproduction of the worker—his daily living expenses, his training and the maintenance of his wife and children. To boost profits, the capitalist seeks to drive down the cost of labor—not just the wages paid into the pockets of the workers but also services like public education and health care, which are necessary to the maintenance of the proletariat.
Feminists sometimes criticize aspects of the family, but usually only to complain about “gender roles,” as if the problem were a lifestyle argument over who should do the dishes or feed the baby its bottle. It is the institution of the family that socializes people from infancy to behave according to certain norms, respect authority and develop the habits of obedience and deference so useful for capitalist profit-making. The family is invaluable to the bourgeoisie as a reservoir of small private property and in some cases petty production, serving as an ideological brake on social consciousness. Vogel ignores these questions and focuses strictly on women’s unpaid “domestic labor.”
The Ultimate Goal
Vogel’s position is even weaker with respect to the ultimate goal of women’s liberation. This is seen especially in what she doesn’t say. Vogel divorces the emancipation of women from overcoming economic scarcity and from the replacement of alienated labor—in the factory as well as the household—by creative, self-satisfying work. Both the ultimate goal of a communist society and the basic means of achieving that goal lie outside the intellectual confines of Vogel’s “socialist feminism.”
When Marx and Engels explained that they subscribed to a materialist understanding of society and social change, they were not only referring to capitalism and earlier class-divided societies (e.g., feudalism). They also provided a materialist understanding of a future classless society. Indeed, that was their fundamental difference with the main socialist currents in the early 19th century—the Owenites, Fourierists and Saint-Simonians—as summarized in Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (originally part of his 1878 polemic, Anti-Dühring). Marx and Engels recognized that a socialist society—understood as the initial stage of communism—requires a level of labor productivity far higher than that in even the most economically advanced capitalist countries today. This is to be achieved through the ongoing expansion of scientific knowledge and its technological application.
Vogel has no such conception. This is especially evident in her discussion of early Soviet Russia. Expressing great appreciation for Lenin’s understanding of and commitment to overcoming the oppression of women, she quotes with approval his 1919 speech, “The Tasks of the Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic”:
“You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them. In most cases housework is the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do. It is exceptionally petty and does not include anything that would in any way promote the development of the woman.
“In pursuance of the socialist ideal we want to struggle for the full implementation of socialism, and here an extensive field of labour opens up before women. We are now making serious preparations to clear the ground for the building of socialism, but the building of socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women and when we undertake the new work together with women who have been emancipated from that petty, stultifying, unproductive work.”
Collected Works, Vol. 30
Vogel wrongly contends that Lenin’s was a lone voice crying in the wilderness. She implies that the main obstacle to overcoming the oppression of women in early Soviet Russia was ideological: the pervasive patriarchal attitudes among working-class and peasant men, combined with the supposed indifference to women’s liberation among the mainly male cadre of the Bolshevik party. Vogel writes:
“Lenin’s remarks about male chauvinism never acquired programmatic form, and the campaign against male ideological backwardness remained at most a minor theme in Bolshevik practice. Nonetheless, his observations on the problem represented an extremely rare acknowledgment of its seriousness.... Lenin’s theoretical contributions failed to make a lasting impression.”
In fact, enormous efforts were made by the Soviet government to relieve working-class women of the burden of housework and childcare through the establishment of communal kitchens, laundries, nurseries and the like. Both the Bolsheviks and the Communist International established special departments for work among women. In the early Soviet workers state, the Zhenotdel was active in both the European and Central Asian regions.
The limits to the liberating policies of the Communist government under V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky were not ideological but the result of objective conditions: the poverty of material resources aggravated by years of imperialist war and civil war. Trotsky explained in a 1923 essay, “From the Old Family to the New,” included in the 1924 compilation Problems of Everyday Life (a work that Vogel fails to mention):
“The physical preparations for the conditions of the new life and the new family, again, cannot fundamentally be separated from the general work of socialist construction. The workers’ state must become wealthier in order that it may be possible seriously to tackle the public education of children and the releasing of the family from the burden of the kitchen and the laundry. Socialization of family housekeeping and public education of children are unthinkable without a marked improvement in our economics as a whole. We need more socialist economic forms. Only under such conditions can we free the family from the functions and cares that now oppress and disintegrate it. Washing must be done by a public laundry, catering by a public restaurant, sewing by a public workshop. Children must be educated by good public teachers who have a real vocation for the work.”
Problems of Everyday Life (Pathfinder Press, 1973)
Material scarcity was the source of yet another important area of inequality between men and women in early Soviet Russia (and by extension in any economically backward workers state). This was the scarcity of highly skilled labor requiring advanced knowledge and technical capacity. Skilled industrial workers and members of the technical intelligentsia (e.g., engineers, architects) had to be given higher wages than unskilled workers, although the difference was much less than in capitalist countries. This better-paid stratum of the labor force, inherited from the tiny modern capitalist sector of tsarist Russia, was predominantly male. Although efforts were made to rectify this, the early workers state lacked the material resources to educate and train women to become machinists and engineers in numbers sufficient to overcome male predominance in skilled labor.
Vogel concludes her book by offering a projection of the transition to communism following the overthrow of capitalism:
“Confronted with the terrible reality of women’s oppression, nineteenth-century utopian socialists called for the abolition of the family. Their drastic demand continues to find advocates among socialists even today. In its place, however, historical materialism poses the difficult question of simultaneously reducing and redistributing domestic labour in the course of transforming it into an integral component of social production in communist society. Just as in the socialist transition ‘the state is not “abolished”, it withers away’, so too, domestic labour must wither away. The proper management of domestic labour and women’s work during the transition to communism is therefore a critical problem for socialist society, for only on this basis can the economic, political, and ideological conditions for women’s true liberation be established and maintained. In the process, the family in its particular historical form as a kin-based social unit for the reproduction of exploitable labour-power in class-society will also wither away—and with it both patriarchal family-relations and the oppression of women.” [emphasis in original]
But how is this reduction and redistribution of domestic labor to be achieved? In the transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to full communism, the transformation of the family is a corollary to expanded production and greater abundance. Its withering away, or disintegration, grows out of economic success. In the process, it will be replaced by new ways of living that will be immeasurably richer, more human and fulfilling. There may well be a need to develop some rules in the course of this transformation as people search for new modes of living. In the transitional period, it will be the job of the workers’ democratic collective, the Soviet, to build alternatives and to guide the process.
Vogel does not pose the crucial question: If women are to be liberated from household drudgery, what then are they liberated to do? Will a reduction in the time spent on housework be offset by a comparable increase in the time spent at work—two fewer hours a day washing clothes and mopping floors, two more hours working on a factory assembly line? That’s certainly not the Marxist idea of women’s liberation.
The replacement of housework and child rearing by collective institutions are aspects of a fundamental change in the relation between production and labor time. Under a planned, socialist economy, all kinds of economic activity—from making steel and computers to cleaning clothes, floors and furniture—will undergo a constant, rapid increase in output per unit of labor input. Long before a communist society is attained, most housework may well be automated. More generally, there will be a steady reduction in the total labor time necessary for the production and maintenance of the means of consumption as well as the means of production.
In a fully communist society, most time will be what is now called “free time.” Necessary labor will absorb such a small share of time and energy that the individual will freely grant it to the social collective. Everyone will have the available time along with the requisite material and cultural resources to engage in creative, self-satisfying work. In the Grundrisse (1857), Marx cited composing music as an example of genuinely free labor.
[TO BE CONTINUED]

Workers Vanguard No. 1069
29 May 2015
 
The Marxist Approach to Women’s Liberation
Communism and the Family
(Women and Revolution pages)
(Part Two)
Part One of the article that concludes here appeared in WV No. 1068 (15 May).
In 2005, Sharon Smith, a leading figure in the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and a self-styled theorist, produced a book, Women and Socialism: Essays on Women’s Liberation (Haymarket Books), which is slated for a revised, expanded edition to appear later this year. An excerpt from this new edition, “Theorizing Women’s Oppression: Domestic Labor and Women’s Oppression,” which appeared in International Socialist Review (March 2013), outlines what the ISO says is its new approach to feminism. Smith’s “theorizing” draws heavily on the concept of unpaid domestic labor as the basis of women’s oppression, as put forth in Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (Haymarket Books, 2013).
Smith begins by criticizing Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a veritable requirement for entrée into the petty-bourgeois feminist milieu: “Marx’s and Engels’s articulations of women’s oppression often contain contradictory components—in some respects fundamentally challenging the gender status quo while in other respects merely reflecting it.” Smith makes an even stronger criticism of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, an event that liberals, feminist and otherwise, consider as at best a utopian experiment that failed and at worst the birth of a totalitarian police state.
Playing to anti-Communist prejudices, Smith contends that the Bolsheviks supported the traditional role of women by elevating motherhood to the highest social duty: “Despite the enormous achievements of the 1917 Russian Revolution—including the legalization of abortion and divorce, the rights to vote and run for political office, and an end to laws criminalizing both prostitution and gay sexuality—it did not produce a theory that challenged either natural heterosexual norms or the primacy of women’s maternal destinies.” Smith then quotes a statement by John Riddell, a leftist historian who is frequently published in the ISO’s International Socialist Review: “Communist women in that period viewed childbearing as a social responsibility and sought to assist ‘poor women who would like to experience motherhood as the highest joy’.”
By leaning on a quote taken out of context, Smith and Riddell falsify Bolshevik doctrine and practice. The Bolsheviks viewed the replacement of the family by collective means of raising children not as a distant goal in a future communist society but as a program that they were beginning to carry out in the existing Soviet Russian workers state. Alexandra Kollontai, a leader of Bolshevik work among women, advocated that socialized institutions take full responsibility for children, their physical and psychological well-being, from infancy. Speaking at the First All-Russian Congress of Women in 1918, she stated:
“Society is taking upon itself little by little all concerns which previously were parental....
“Homes for infants, crèches, nurseries, kindergartens, children’s colonies and homes, hospitals and sanitoria for curing and healing sick children, as well as children’s cafeterias, school lunches, the distribution of free books to children, the outfitting of schoolchildren with warm clothing, boots—doesn’t this show that caring for children is moving beyond the boundaries of the family, is being taken away from parents and transferred to the collective, to society?”
— “The Family and the Communist State.” Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Ed. William G. Rosenberg. University of Michigan Press, 1990.
In a socialist society, the nursing and teaching staff in crèches, preschools and kindergartens will consist of both males and females. In this way—and only in this way—will the age-old division of labor between men and women in raising young children be eliminated.
Kollontai’s views on the future of the family were not unusual among leading Bolsheviks. In Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Wendy Goldman, an American academic of liberal feminist sympathies, writes that Alexander Goikhbarg, the primary author of the first (1918) legal Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship, “encouraged parents to reject ‘their narrow and irrational love for their children.’ In his view, state upbringing would ‘provide vastly better results than the private, individual, unscientific, and irrational approach of individually “loving” but ignorant parents’.” The Bolsheviks sought not only to liberate women from household drudgery and patriarchal domination but also to free children from the often malign effects of parental authority.
The Bolsheviks and Collective Childcare
Echoing Vogel, Smith writes:
“If the economic function of the working-class family, so crucial in reproducing labor power for the capitalist system—and at the same time forming the social root of all women’s oppression—were to be eliminated, the material basis for women’s liberation could be created. This outcome can only begin to materialize with the elimination of the capitalist system, replaced by a socialist society that socializes the domestic labor formerly assigned to women.”
Here Smith’s use of the term “domestic labor” is ambiguous. Does she mean only housework and the physical care of young children? What about the “domestic labor” involved in what is considered parenting in the U.S. today? Smith does not say. She simply ignores the question of the interpersonal relations between a mother and her children: listening to and talking to them about their problems, desires and fears; teaching them early language skills and basic hygiene, safety and other practical tasks; playing games with them; helping with their schoolwork. But without viewing such interactions as the province of the collective, Smith’s idea of socialism is entirely compatible with the preservation of the family sans housework.
Why the ambiguity on a question of such central importance? The ISO appeals to young left-liberal idealists by peddling a version of “Marxism” tailored to their views and prejudices. This organization almost never takes a position on any question that is really unpopular in the American radical-liberal milieu. Young feminist-minded women would find the idea of family life without having to do housework quite attractive. But to give up their proprietary family home and their concern for only their “own” children? The petty-bourgeois audience that Smith is addressing would be appalled at the Bolshevik program for the transformation of daily life through collective modes of living. As Kollontai wrote:
“The working woman, becoming a social fighter for the great cause of the freedom of workers, must learn to understand that old divisions need not exist. These are my children, and all my maternal concern, all my love, is for them. And these are your children, the neighbor’s, and I have no concern with them. Let them be hungrier than mine, colder than mine, I have no concern for another’s children! Now the worker-mother who is aware must learn not to make a distinction between yours and mine, but to remember that they are only our children, children of working, communist Russia.” [emphasis in original]
In 1929, the Russian Communist Party (CP) was still calling for the withering away of the family, despite the rise to political power of a conservative bureaucratic caste led by J.V. Stalin five years earlier. But as we wrote in “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women” (Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 59, Spring 2006), “By 1936-37, when the Russian CP’s degeneration was complete, Stalinist doctrine pronounced this a ‘crude mistake’ and called for a ‘reconstruction of the family on a new socialist basis’.”
The Family as a Social Construct
Whereas Smith and Riddell falsely claim that the early Bolshevik regime supported the traditional role of women as primary caregivers for their young children, Goldman criticizes them for not doing so:
“The Bolsheviks attached little importance to the powerful emotional bonds between parents and their children. They assumed that most of the necessary care for children, even infants, could be relegated to paid, public employees. They tended to slight the role of the mother-child bond in infant survival and early childhood development, although even a rudimentary acquaintance with the work of the prerevolutionary foundling homes would have revealed the shockingly low survival rates for infants in institutional settings and the obstacles to healthy child development.”
This analogy is entirely invalid. The treatment and fate of young children in the impoverished foundling homes of tsarist Russia can by no means be compared to collective childcare in a revolutionary society. A workers state, especially in an economically advanced country, would have the human and material resources to provide far better care for young children in all respects than a mother in the setting of a private, family household.
Furthermore, the Bolsheviks put great emphasis on the health and well-being of mother and child. The 1918 Labor Code provided at least one paid 30-minute break every three hours to feed a baby. The maternity insurance program implemented the same year provided for a fully paid maternity leave of eight weeks, nursing breaks and factory rest facilities for women on the job, free pre- and post-natal care and cash allowances. With its networks of maternity clinics, consultation offices, feeding stations, nurseries and mother and infant homes, this program was perhaps the single most popular innovation of the Soviet regime among women.
Feminists in the U.S. and elsewhere usually denounce the proposition that “biology equals destiny” as an expression of male chauvinism. Yet Goldman makes the assumption that women, or for that matter men, who are not biologically related to infants and young children cannot develop the same protective feelings toward them as their birth mother. Parents of adopted children may well argue with this idea. But modern adoption practices in the U.S. are also based on the concept that only in a “family”—be it biological mother and father, adoptive parents or gay or transgender parents—can a child get the proper care and love. Far from being a fact of nature, the idea that raising children can succeed only in a family setting is a social construct.
When people lived as hunter-gatherers (the vast majority of the 200,000 years our species has been around), the band or tribe, not the “pair bond,” was the basic unit of human existence. One example from the not-too-distant past comes from the testimony of 17th-century Jesuit missionaries among the Naskapi hunting people of Labrador. As related by Eleanor Burke Leacock in her fine introduction to Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (International Publishers, 1972), Jesuits complained about the sexual freedom of Naskapi women, pointing out to one man that “he himself was not sure that his son, who was there present, was his son.” The Naskapi’s reply is telling: “Thou hast no sense. You French people love only your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.”
The disappearance of classes and private property under communism would lead inevitably to the full freedom of sexual relations and to the disappearance of any concept of legitimacy or illegitimacy. Everyone would have access to the fullest benefits of society by virtue of being a citizen of the international Soviet.
The Family as Carrier of Bourgeois Ideology
Vogel and Smith implicitly limit the concept of domestic labor to physical activities. Thus Smith writes: “The day-to-day responsibilities of family still center around feeding, clothing, cleaning, and otherwise caring for its members, and that responsibility still falls mainly on women.” But raising children for their future entry into the labor market is not like raising calves and lambs for the livestock market. The reproduction of human labor power has not only a biological but also a social, i.e., ideological character. Taking a child to church or religious instruction is also a form of domestic labor, in its own way important for the maintenance of the capitalist system; likewise, taking a child to a movie that glorifies “family values,” patriotism, etc. The family is the primary institution through which bourgeois ideology in its various forms is transmitted from one generation to the next.
The ABC of Communism (1919), written by two leading Bolsheviks, Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, explained that the tiny minority of capitalists cannot dominate the working class solely through the use of physical force and coercion carried out by the police and military. The maintenance of the capitalist system also involves the force of ideas:
“The bourgeoisie is well aware that it cannot control the working masses by the use of force alone. It is necessary that the workers’ brains should be completely enmeshed as if in a spider’s web.... The capitalist State maintains specialists to stupefy and subdue the proletariat; it maintains bourgeois teachers and professors, the clergy, bourgeois authors and journalists.”
Bukharin and Preobrazhensky pointed to three main institutions by which bourgeois ideological domination is maintained: the educational system, the church and the press, with the mass media today also including films, television and the Internet.
In the advanced capitalist countries, where children are widely viewed as the property of their parents, the family has a different relationship to each of those institutions. From the age of five or six, children are legally required to attend school (public or private), and younger children often go to preschool. From the time that they’re toddlers, children watch television, with some parents, usually mothers, controlling which programs they watch. Unlike school teachers and TV producers, clergymen have no such automatic direct access to young children—in the U.S. and elsewhere, the parents decide whether or not their children are subjected to religious indoctrination. At least initially, such indoctrination is imposed upon children against their subjective desires. There probably isn’t a four- or five-year-old on the planet who would not rather play games with other children than attend religious services.
Consider a ten-year-old boy whose parents are practicing Catholics. He has been taken to church for as long as he can remember. He has attended Catholic school either in place of public school or supplementary to it. He has heard prayers said before meals at home and experienced multiple expressions of religious belief in everyday domestic life. Such a child may well adhere to Catholic beliefs and doctrines at least until a later stage in life when free of parental authority.
Conversely, consider a ten-year-old whose parents are irreligious. His knowledge of religion is limited to what he has learned in public school, occasional information gleaned from TV programs and movies and discussions with other children who are religious-minded. Such a child will almost certainly be irreligious. But being irreligious does not immunize a child from other, likely “progressive” forms of bourgeois ideology. A child raised by parents who subscribe to “secular humanism” will likely adhere to political liberalism in the U.S. or social democracy in West Europe and possibly intellectual elitism. There is also a current of atheistic libertarianism (associated with Ayn Rand) that glorifies self-centered individualism and “free market” capitalism. Religion is not the only form of reactionary bourgeois ideology.
The family oppresses children as well as women, and it is plenty deforming to men’s consciousness as well. This basic social truth is ignored if not denied by both liberal and “socialist” feminists. For them to recognize that the oppression of children is intrinsic to the family would mean (horror of horrors!) criticizing the socially conditioned behavior of women in their role as mothers. Professed Marxists like Vogel and Smith, who propagate the thesis that domestic labor is the basis of women’s oppression, implicitly treat mothers as only doing good for their children.
Against the Sexual Repression of Children
While most feminists would condemn the physical abuse of children, they are effectively indifferent to psychological abuse. To take one example, the children of fundamentalist Christian parents (whether Catholic or Protestant) suffer mental torture in believing that they will go to hell if they behave badly.
Far more widespread and psychologically damaging is the sexual repression of children extending well into adolescence. Capitalist society is geared to penalize the expression of sexuality in children from birth. Even the most enlightened parents cannot shield children from the anti-sex, moralistic ideology that pervades American society—everywhere from the pink- and blue-themed aisles at Toys “R” Us and the ban on public nudity to the demonization of any sexual activity by children, including masturbation. As infants’ and toddlers’ primary caregivers, mothers more than fathers begin the process of that sexual repression, teaching children to feel shame about their bodies and to suppress their natural curiosity.
August Bebel, a principal leader of German Social Democracy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, comes off as a radical sexual libertarian compared to today’s “socialist feminists.” In Woman Under Socialism (1879), he insisted:
The satisfaction of the sexual instinct is as much a private concern as the satisfaction of any other natural instinct. None is therefor accountable to others, and no unsolicited judge may interfere.... The simple circumstance that all bashful prudery and affectation of secrecy regarding natural matters will have vanished is a guarantee of a more natural intercourse of the sexes than that which prevails to-day.” [emphasis in original]
One can read hundreds of pages written by today’s “socialist feminists” without finding any argument that a socialist society will enable everyone to better fulfill their sexual needs and desires.
The Communist Future
Under communism, people will be genuinely and truly free to shape and reshape their interpersonal relations. Of course, this freedom is not absolute. Humanity cannot transcend its biological makeup and relation to the natural environment. Communist man and woman, too, will grow old and die. Neither can mankind sweep the slate totally clean and build society anew. Communist humanity will inherit for good and ill the accumulated cultural heritage of our species. We cannot know the sexual practices of communist society because these will be determined in the future. Any projection, much less prescription, would carry the imprint of attitudes, values and prejudices shaped by a repressive class society.
A fundamental difference between Marxists and feminists, whether liberal or professed socialist, is that our ultimate goal is not gender equality as such but rather the progressive development of the human species as a whole. The communal raising of children under conditions of material abundance and cultural richness will produce human beings whose mental capacities as well as psychological well-being will be vastly superior to people in this impoverished, oppressive and class-divided society. In a 1932 speech on the Russian Revolution, “In Defence of October” (Fourth International, July-August 1947), Leon Trotsky said:
“It is true that humanity has more than once brought forth giants of thought and action, who tower over their contemporaries like summits in a chain of mountains. The human race has a right to be proud of its Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Beethoven, Goethe, Marx, Edison, and Lenin. But why are they so rare? Above all, because almost without exception, they came out of the upper and middle classes. Apart from rare exceptions, the sparks of genius in the suppressed depths of the people are choked before they can burst into flame. But also because the processes of creating, developing and educating a human being have been and remain essentially a matter of chance, not illuminated by theory and practice, not subjected to consciousness and will....
“Once he has done with the anarchic forces of his own society man will set to work on himself, in the pestle and the retort of the chemist. For the first time mankind will regard itself as raw material, or at best as a physical and psychic semi-finished product. Socialism will mean a leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom in this sense also, that the man of today, with all his contradictions and lack of harmony, will open the road for a new and happier race.”