Click on the title to link to a "Workers Vanguard", newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S, article on the subject mentioned in the headline.
Showing posts with label WOMEN'S STRUGGLES. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WOMEN'S STRUGGLES. Show all posts
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Saturday, March 16, 2019
From the Archives- The Fight For Women's Liberation in SDS
Commentary
March Is Women's History Month
This article is passed on as an item of historical interest to the radical movement. It is a companion archival document to one posted here earlier this year about connecting the struggles to the working class, the central focus in overturning the old society. I would only comment that some of the analysis reads as though it could have been written today, although some ideas expressed here in general terms has been greatly expanded by the last generation of feminist and socialist work on the relation between class and gender.
Moreover, today there is no mass radical youth movement or other audience ready to 'storm heaven' to direct such sentiments toward. At that time radical youth, including radical black and white working class youth, were looking for ways to fundamentally change society and to fight against that generation’s war in Vietnam. In those days radicals, moreover, after the experiences of 1968, for the most part, stood point blank against the bourgeois parties and were out in the streets. Today those who are trying to ‘brain-trust’ a new SDS for this generation of youth seem to have regressed to a point early in the evolution of old SDS where the youth were directed toward 'going half-way with LBJ ( Lyndon Baines Johnson)' and the Democratic Party. We should, however, try to learn something from history. Read on.
Workers Vanguard no. 910 W March 2008
"The Fight for Women's Liberation"
Revolutionary Marxists at December 1969 SDS Conference (Young Spartacus pages)
In honor of International Women's Day {March 8), we reprint below a position paper first presented at the December 1969 New Haven conference of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) by the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC), forerunner of today's Spartacus Youth Clubs. This is a historic document of the Spartacist League, part of our struggle to bring the materialist, Marxist analysis of the nature of women's oppression to the New Left in the period of the early growth of the radical women's liberation movement We put forward the understanding that the core institution of women's oppression, the family, arose with private property (see The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels). While women's oppression is distinct from and predates the oppression of the working class, it can only be ended through socialist revolution. This analysis stands against both "lifestyle liberationist" feminists who view gender as the main division in society and Stalinists (Maoist and otherwise) who hold the position that the family can be "a unit for fighting the ruling class" (as the Worker-Student Alliance [WSA] caucus in SDS argued).
SDS was originally the youth group of the Cold War, anti-Soviet "socialists" of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). SDS moved leftward under the impact of events, particularly the struggle of the civil rights movement against Jim Crow segregation in the South and, later, the struggles against the Vietnam War. In 1962, SDS's Port Huron Statement toned down the overt anti-Communism mat was the stock in trade of the LID social democrats, and in retribution SDS leaders were locked out of their offices. By the end of 1965, SDS had dropped its anti-Communist exclusion clause and split from the LID entirely. It grew rapidly, drawing in tens of thousands of young activists at its peak.
In the summer of 1969, SDS underwent a split. As part of an orientation toward revolutionary regroupment, die RMC, supporters of the Trotskyist program of the Spartacist League, critically supported the wing led by Progressive Labor (PL) and its WSA caucus, which put forward a crudely pro-working-class orientation as against the generally Maoist National Collective. PL itself had been formed from a left split from the extremely reformist Communist Party in the direction of Maoism.
The context of widespread leftward movement, fueled not least by opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft, and the politically open character of SDS provided an arena for revolutionary Marxists to struggle for our program. The RMC sought to take full advantage of this necessarily time-limited situation in winning young would-be revolutionaries to Marxism. To this end, we put forward position papers and resolutions arguing for the program of revolutionary proletarian internationalism. We fought for Marxism as a program for the liberation of all of humanity, especially highlighting the need for a materialist program to confront the oppression of women and blacks (see also "Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics," WV No. 897,31 August 2007).
This position paper also mentions in passing the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC). The former was the youth organization of the Socialist Workers Party, a once Trotskyist organization by then degenerated into reformism—as exemplified by its leading role in the class-collaborationist National Peace Action Coalition. The Coalition's purpose was to appeal to liberal Democratic Party politicians who sought to extricate American imperialism from the losing colonial war in Vietnam and to head off a challenge to the capitalist order at home. The ISC were a left split from the Cold Warriors of the Socialist Party who purveyed the same anti-Sovietism with different trappings. Today, readers will recognize them as the still rabidly anti-Communist and helplessly liberal International Socialist Organization.
* * * *
I. SDS and Women's Liberation
SDS needs a clear, accurate class analysis of the special oppression of women and a Marxist program for women's liberation. No other radical youth group has yet undertaken this task. The YSA substitutes enthusiastic tail-ending for program; the ISC in their Statement of Principles patronizingly caters to the separatist mood by telling women that socialist revolution won't solve their problems automatically—as if other sorts of oppression would disappear without the intervention of consciousness?
The existing women's liberation movement, both liberal and radical, seems to see sex as the basic "class division" in society. This low level of theoretical development means an opportunity for Marxists to intervene with a working-class line. However, we will render our intervention useless if we cling to an oversimplified analysis that the only form of oppression is class oppression and confine our interest to the economic superexploitation of women workers.
The class question is the decisive issue in class society. However, other additional types of oppression do exist as well
—e.g., racial oppression, national oppression, women's oppression. To deny that Marxist revolutionaries must concern themselves with these issues is sectarian and blatantly anti-Leninist It is vital that revolutionaries participate in these struggles. The basis of such participation must be the realization that the class question is decisive and thus any movement which fails to identify itself with the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class is doomed to be beset by utopianism, crackpotism, liberal illusions and—ultimately—irrelevance.
The SDS resolution (which was sponsored by the WSA caucus and opposed by us) passed by our June convention (after the walk-out of the RYM [Revolutionary Youth Movement] splitters) did not provide a correct analysis or program. This failure was primarily due to an anti-historical, unMarxist method which resulted in an entirely incorrect position on the family.
II. Oppression and the Family
The June WSA resolution included the following statement: "The family does not have to be primarily reactionary. We should attempt to attack the bourgeois aspect and make the family a unit for fighting the ruling class."
This statement is flatly wrong. It ignores, in a crude anti-theoretical manner, the entire thrust of the Marxian critique of the family in order to accept as potentially revolutionary an institution which is inherently reactionary. The family can no more become a unit for fighting capitalism than can racial segregation, which is also a bourgeois institution. Both of these socio-economic institutions are oppressive and help maintain the capitalist system. Both are tools by which the ruling class maintains and strengthens false consciousness in the working class.
As a pro-working-class student organization, SDS must provide a Marxian class analysis of the social oppression of women. The primary source document for this analysis is The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in which Frederick Engels traces the history of the increasing oppression of women through the various stages of economic development of society, showing that the appearance of private property brought with it the necessity of transferring this property through inheritance. From this flows the need to trace descent; and since the male, in the primitive division of labor, had come to be the property-owner, he is therefore given the right to exclusive sexual access to the bearer of his children. Hence, the institution of marriage emerges.
Following the method of Engels, examining the oppression of women in class society and the nature of class society itself, we must seek its roots in the primitive division of labor, which resulted in the social division of man and woman, placing the latter in a subordinate position, as class society was born. Subsequently the class divisions transcended the sexual division, and class became the dominant reality of society. To put it another way, Mrs. Rockefeller and her maid both suffer in varying degree from the pervasive oppression of females and have some issues in common, but the maid has more in common with her own husband than with Mrs. Rockefeller.
Sexual divisions continue to be socially enforced, since they bolster the capitalist system. The social inferiority of women is maintained by the entire structure of class society, including its ideologies. Many women internalize and come to believe the false ideas of class culture, and actually feel themselves to be inferior. Women today tend to be "under-achievers"; feeling rightly that there is not much future for them, they waste their talents and energies on trivialities, decide to live through their families or succumb to despair. It is our task to offer to these women a worthwhile goal: their own liberation, which cannot be a personal "self-liberation" but requires a socialist revolution and the withering away of the family. As communist revolutionaries, further, these women will lead incomparably richer lives. They will come to understand their own oppression and the origins,
the nature and the future of the family. As stated by Engels:
"We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual, a man, and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and no other.
"For this purpose the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, inheritable wealth, the means of production, into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting.... The position of men will be very much altered, but the position of women, of att women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike whether or not they are, in bourgeois legal jargon, legitimate."
This is far from advocating that straw man of the bosses' press, that under communism men and women will live in separate barracks and all children will be brought up in a state orphanage. We are rather advocating the replacement of marriage as a compulsory economic unit with voluntary forms better suited to people's physical and emotional needs. Since the institution of the family is an integral part of the capitalist system, the struggle for women's liberation is inseparable from the struggle for a socialist revolution.
III. The Family and the Class
The WSA resolution states: "With the rise of capitalism and modern industry, the economic foundation on which the traditional family was based was destroyed. Women were taken out of the home and put into the factory. But the special exploitation of women, who became a cheap reserve labor force, continued. To justify the double exploitation of women workers, the ruling class fostered the ideology of male chauvinism."
To set the record straight, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution women and children formed the bulk of the industrial proletariat. The reasons for this are well established. Women and children were cheap, unskilled, docile labor used by the rising capitalists to batter down the wages of men (usually more highly paid) and to destroy the craft industries employing (relatively) highly paid male artisans. To quote Marx in Capital:
"The value of labor power was determined not only by the labor-time necessary to maintain the individual adult laborer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of the family into the labor market, spreads the value of man's labor-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labor power."
Consequently, workers with large families were often given preference by the early capitalists who, as a matter of fact, often compelled the worker to require his entire family to work in his factory or lose his job.
The bourgeoisie of this period actually devised ideological apologia for femaie and child labor (see Jurgen Kuczynski, The Rise of the Working Class, Chapter 2, "The Working Class Emerges"). The limitation of female and child labor (by, e.g., the Factory Acts in Britain) represented concessions wrested by the "working class from capital. The progressive withdrawal of this super-exploited labor from the factory system compelled the capitalists to employ machinery in their stead if they wished to remain in business.
The destruction of the traditional family by employing women and children in production creates the possibility of founding the relationship between the sexes on a new economic basis. But, the spontaneous way this employment developed with the rise of capital was, to quote Marx, "a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery" which the advanced sections of the working class fought. The kernel of this contradiction is that under capitalism the family remains—because there is no other socio-economic institution to replace it.
An Institution of Indoctrination
The bourgeoisie and its theorists tinkered with the old institutions in order to fit them better into the new industrial capitalism. In the age of disintegrating feudalism, before the capitalists had accumulated much experience in running their own system, some of them even toyed with very radical ideas regarding the state, family and religion. They soon learned, however, that whether they themselves liked conventional family life or not, or whether they believed in God or not, the institutions of religion and the family were indispensable for inculcating the required docility, submissiveness, respect for authority and superstition in the working class. Without religion and the family the workers would be far more likely to become troublesome. For this reason the bourgeoisie learned to pay public obeisance to the ideals of religion and the family whether they personally believed in them or not. When economically necessary, the capitalist class will tolerate and even encourage female and child labor—but without allowing the development of institutions to replace the family. The working woman is not really freed from her role as household slave by obtaining work outside the home; she merely has one responsibility added to another.
Although individual families were destroyed—and are being destroyed—by capitalism, the family as an institution was not hurt, as it rises or falls with the existence of private property. When economic considerations permitted, the ruling class periodically initiated campaigns, through the media and the churches, to get women back into the home. This tendency reached a peak of brutal chauvinism and cynical barbarism with the Nazi slogan, "Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche," which portrays the woman deluded by religion and as breeder, babysitter and cook. "The family that prays together stays together": both religion and the family are bourgeois institutions of false consciousness.
Functions of the Family
Women and children left the process of production, not chiefly because the capitalists feared for the nuclear family and forced them out but in large part because under capitalism no substitute for the family is available. The domestic labor performed by the housewife has no exchange value, and the family is socially necessary to maintain the working class. The necessity of the bourgeoisie to concentrate and transfer its wealth via inheritance makes the family an ideological necessity for capitalism. Also, the struggle by the working class to limit the exploitation of women and children necessarily caused production to become more capital-intensive, hence ultimately raising the standard of living of the entire working class while in the long run diminishing the amount of labor needed in production.
In the present period, a period of capitalism in decay, there simply are not enough jobs to go around. Women, because of the domestic role they of necessity (under capitalism) must more or less fulfill, are on the fringes of the reserve army of the working class. When they are needed in production (such as World War II) the capitalists have no compunctions about the sanctity of hearth and home, and will gladly hire them to do "men's" work and will just as gladly drop them from production when they are no longer needed. (An unemployed male ex-soldiery would be a far greater threat to the bourgeois order than the more docile women unemployed workers.)
The hollow satisfactions of male supremacy within the home oppress both the men and the women and encourage false consciousness (male chauvinism). By way of comparison, segregation is similarly a tool of oppression (the hollow satisfactions of white supremacy in the U.S. encourage whites to oppress blacks) and false consciousness (racism). The working man learns to direct his anger and frustrations against his wife, rather than against the bosses. He is told that he is the boss in his own home ("a man's home is his castle"). Thus, the family as an economic and social institution is a shackle on the consciousness of the men workers as well as that of women,
The Family in Non-Capitalist States
The family serves its reactionary function not only in capitalist societies but also in the bureaucratically-deformed workers' states—i.e., Russia, China, and those other nations which have abolished the material basis of the family—private property—but which still require the family as a socio-cultural institution in order to suppress the consciousness of the masses, rendering them subservient to the parasitic bureaucracies headed by Brezhnev & Co., Mao, etc.
For example, the initial effect of the Chinese revolution—which in its need to fight imperialism found itself completing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and establishing the property relations of a workers' state—was the unleashing of an immensely progressive social force. The feudal oppression of women was abolished. But in the absence of workers' democracy in China, policy is determined by the whim of the Maoist bureaucracy. Hence, the ambivalent attitude toward the family: thus the bureaucracy opposed birth control during the Great Leap Forward; today they encourage long periods of celibacy for the Chinese youth.
The survival of most features of bourgeois family life within the non-capitalist world simultaneously reveals something about both the family and the nature of these societies. The bourgeois family is still the family, similar in decisive respects to the family in non-capitalist but not classless (e.g., feudal and slave) societies. The family unit represents a division of social labor far older than capitalism, dating back to the first "class" division of labor, that between man and woman. As such, the family will require more than the abolition of capitalism (in and of itself) before it is superseded entirely by a freer system of relations between men and women, parents and children. Needless to say, the overthrow of the capitalists and their state by the regime of workers' power is absolutely essential to the liberation of individuals from the narrowness, authoritarianism and sexual inequality inherent in family life. But we should recognize that this task will not be fatty accomplished until the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historic mission: until class distinctions and their vestiges have been eradicated from society, i.e., mankind has reached the stage of classless society, communism. The same holds true for other features of class societies in general—aspects not simply peculiar to capitalism, such as the need for a state power over society, the existence of a certain amount of religious superstition, what Marx called "the idiocy of rural life," etc.
No society could today be entirely free of the dark heritage of the family with its sexual oppression and shut-in, stultifying life for the children. What is most repugnant to any revolutionist about family life in the deformed workers' states, however, is the feet that the political elite ruling these societies presents the survival of an archaic and reactionary institution as a great achievement in building socialism! The Bolsheviks in Lenin's time never glorified the family as an instrument—real or potential—for revolutionary socialist struggle and development. As far as the miserably insufficient level of Russian economy and culture permitted, they passed laws and created institutions designed to free Soviet citizens, particularly the women and children, from the oppressive and stultifying influence of the family. All this was of course reversed with the advent of Stalin's bureaucratic regime, which continues on to this day. After wiping out the left wing of the Communist Party and stripping the Soviets of power, the Stalinized regime proceeded to make divorce more difficult, illegalized abortion, enhanced parental authority, and worst of all called this adaptation to brutal barefoot Russian medievalism—socialism! For reasons which Stalinists find difficult to explain, the Soviet Great Leap Backward in policy regarding women and the family was led by the same parasitic gang who murdered the Old Bolsheviks of all viewpoints, throttled the Spanish revolution and let Hitler take power without firing a shot Just as Stalin was willing to use Great Russian chauvinism against national minorities, praise the Orthodox Church and foster anti-Semitism, so he found that the backward Russian family created a base for his bureaucratic and authoritarian aims. Even where private property no longer exists, the institution of the family serves—at best—to hinder the development of a socialist society. At worst it provides a base of support in the culture for the parasitic bureaucrats who barter away the gains of the revolution. SDS cannot wish away the social and cultural significance of the family by words about making it "a unit for fighting the ruling class." Reactionary institutions serve reactionary ends.
IV. The Working Woman
The economic aspects of the inferior position of women in our society provide the most immediate benefits to capitalism. Whenever capital needs to draw women out into the labor force, it has been able to use the ideology of male superiority to justify the super-exploitation of women workers—that is, women being paid less for doing the same work as the men. After all, "a woman's place is in the home," "a man has the responsibility of supporting a family, a woman only works because she wants to."
The assumption is that the woman's main role is that of the tender mother; hence, she is forced to take care of her children, even if they are unwanted, even when she is divorced. Any woman who wants more out of life is termed "unnatural" or "unfit." The lie is pushed that women are fit only for domestic chores and that therefore their labor is not worth as much as the labor of men.
Women make up one third of the American labor force, but the wages of the full-time working woman average only 60% of those of the average male working full-time. The non-white working woman, suffering under a double load of exploitation and oppression, must indeed be the most victimized category in American capitalist society. In itself, the lower average income of women workers roughly indicates the degree of their oppression, not their super-exploitation relative to working men. (They might—and do—take home less money because they are concentrated in less productive jobs.) But women, even more than other oppressed groups such as Black male workers, frequently receive less for work identical to that performed by more highly paid men. In addition to suffering oppression and discrimination, working -women are super-exploited in the literal and technical sense of the term.
Militancy or Passivity?
In the months ahead, many SDS members expect to have jobs, either full-time or temporary, in factories, on campus, in offices and hospitals, wherever labor struggles are going on. Those of us involved in assisting striking unions will be able to establish contacts with workers on the picket lines. As socialists, we must support the working class in its struggles and seek to raise consciousness, pointing out that male chauvinism divides the workers, that lower wages for women means lower wages for everyone. In Britain, where unions have calculated that wages would increase 11% if women received the same pay as men, equal pay for equal work has become a major union demand. In the U.S., a related process of awakening is going on.
Male chauvinism has made many women workers passive in accepting their lower wages and generally poorer working conditions. Many women are convinced that it isn't "ladylike" or "feminine" to be really militant, that political activity is only for men, that the picket line is too dangerous a place for women. These attitudes serve the bosses and most be fought Radicals should encourage militancy among women workers and relate women's oppression to the oppression and alienation that all workers experience under capitalism. Thus, women's liberation has an important role to play in the struggles of the working class. Further, situations sometimes arise where the women—because they are more oppressed by poor working conditions, low wages and speed-up—are more militant than the men. Women are not pale, fragile, helpless creatures; as workers engaged in industrial production, they can wield workers' power!
V. Male Chauvinism in the Student Movement
The student movement is infected with male chauvinism, a bourgeois ideology, as is the rest of society under capitalism. Long ago most of us faced up to our own deeply imbedded racist attitudes and began to conquer them. Now we must root out our male chauvinism as carefully. Here we are dealing with the social and psychological forms of discrimination rather than the economic aspects of male chauvinism. We must recognize also that no one—including our women members—is automatically exempt from male chauvinist attitudes. We must, by scrupulous attention to the content of a pro-women's liberation position, prevent the subject from becoming a bandwagon which intimidates free political debate in SDS the way that some Black hustlers have sought to racist-bait other radicals into accepting their positions as gospel.
Male chauvinism—perhaps a misleading term since it tends to obscure the feet that women's male chauvinist attitudes can oppress them or other women—has hurt the radical movement. Many potentially radical women are unwilling to join an organization which they believe is indifferent to women's oppression, It is a fact that a good number of the ersatz, crackpot and separatist tendencies in the existing women's liberation groups are a reaction to the male chauvinism in the student movement. These groups blur over class lines and stress "individual liberation" and other Utopian schemes.
Many of the women who do enter radical politics tend to play supportive roles and are not encouraged to develop politically or exercise leadership. SDS must rid itself of male chauvinism and utilize the full talents of all its members.
VI. SDS and Special Groups
It is not enough to fight individual aspects of women's oppression within the labor movement and in SDS. Separate women's liberation groups offer an opportunity to tie together all aspects of women's oppression in the minds of their members, and hence to suggest a single solution—which is socialism. As Marxists, we recognize that special oppression calls for special defensive and combative organizations of the oppressed. For this reason, SDS should give critical support (determined by program) to Black groups which fight the special oppression of Black people; similarly SDS should support women's groups which fight on the basis of a Marxist program for the special needs of women.
Armed with a more developed political and economic analysis of society, SDS members should be able to win the more serious groups away from petty-bourgeois amateur therapy sessions, liberalism, female separatism and vicarious anti-male terrorism, to a working-class perspective. Women's liberation groups are a good arena for winning militant 'women over to SDS and to socialism.
VII. Program for Women's Liberation
When SDS members make a political entry into a special group such as a women's liberation group, they should be armed with a program that raises consciousness by relating specific felt needs to the broader struggle for socialism. We carry through this program by raising a series of transitional demands—that is, demands which flow from the specific struggle but which lead the struggle to a higher level of militancy and political
sophistication.
We move that SDS accept the following program for struggle and agitate around the following demands:
For the abolition of family restrictions;
1. Abolition of abortion laws; each woman must be free to make her own decisions.
2. Free abortions, as part of demand for free quality medical care for everybody, so poor women will have the same freedom of choice as middle-class women.
3. Freely available birth control devices and information.
4. Free full-time child-care facilities for all children, the expenses to be borne by the employer or the state. Free pre-natal, maternity and post-natal care with no loss in pay for time off.
5. Establishment of free voluntary cafeterias in the factories and other places of work.
6. Divorce at the request of either partner. Abolition of alimony. Expenses for children to be paid by the state.
7. Lower the legal age of adulthood to 16. State stipend for schooling or training for any child who wishes to leave home. Free education for all children, with housing, food and stipend. No loco parentis. Student-teacher-worker control of all schools and colleges.
To fight the super-exploitation of women workers:
8. Full and equal pay for equal work.
9. Equal work: equal access to all job categories. Shorter work week with no loss in pay ("30 for 40") to eliminate unemployment at the capitalists* expense.
To fight male chauvinism:
10. An end to all forms of discrimination—legal, political, social and cultural.
SDS should seek the creation of a non-exclusionist class-conscious women's liberation organization in which SDS members can participate and struggle on the basis of the above program. Toward this end, we should direct interested SDS members to seek to initiate, along with other radical women, a nationally-oriented women's liberation publication.
March Is Women's History Month
This article is passed on as an item of historical interest to the radical movement. It is a companion archival document to one posted here earlier this year about connecting the struggles to the working class, the central focus in overturning the old society. I would only comment that some of the analysis reads as though it could have been written today, although some ideas expressed here in general terms has been greatly expanded by the last generation of feminist and socialist work on the relation between class and gender.
Moreover, today there is no mass radical youth movement or other audience ready to 'storm heaven' to direct such sentiments toward. At that time radical youth, including radical black and white working class youth, were looking for ways to fundamentally change society and to fight against that generation’s war in Vietnam. In those days radicals, moreover, after the experiences of 1968, for the most part, stood point blank against the bourgeois parties and were out in the streets. Today those who are trying to ‘brain-trust’ a new SDS for this generation of youth seem to have regressed to a point early in the evolution of old SDS where the youth were directed toward 'going half-way with LBJ ( Lyndon Baines Johnson)' and the Democratic Party. We should, however, try to learn something from history. Read on.
Workers Vanguard no. 910 W March 2008
"The Fight for Women's Liberation"
Revolutionary Marxists at December 1969 SDS Conference (Young Spartacus pages)
In honor of International Women's Day {March 8), we reprint below a position paper first presented at the December 1969 New Haven conference of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) by the Revolutionary Marxist Caucus (RMC), forerunner of today's Spartacus Youth Clubs. This is a historic document of the Spartacist League, part of our struggle to bring the materialist, Marxist analysis of the nature of women's oppression to the New Left in the period of the early growth of the radical women's liberation movement We put forward the understanding that the core institution of women's oppression, the family, arose with private property (see The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Friedrich Engels). While women's oppression is distinct from and predates the oppression of the working class, it can only be ended through socialist revolution. This analysis stands against both "lifestyle liberationist" feminists who view gender as the main division in society and Stalinists (Maoist and otherwise) who hold the position that the family can be "a unit for fighting the ruling class" (as the Worker-Student Alliance [WSA] caucus in SDS argued).
SDS was originally the youth group of the Cold War, anti-Soviet "socialists" of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID). SDS moved leftward under the impact of events, particularly the struggle of the civil rights movement against Jim Crow segregation in the South and, later, the struggles against the Vietnam War. In 1962, SDS's Port Huron Statement toned down the overt anti-Communism mat was the stock in trade of the LID social democrats, and in retribution SDS leaders were locked out of their offices. By the end of 1965, SDS had dropped its anti-Communist exclusion clause and split from the LID entirely. It grew rapidly, drawing in tens of thousands of young activists at its peak.
In the summer of 1969, SDS underwent a split. As part of an orientation toward revolutionary regroupment, die RMC, supporters of the Trotskyist program of the Spartacist League, critically supported the wing led by Progressive Labor (PL) and its WSA caucus, which put forward a crudely pro-working-class orientation as against the generally Maoist National Collective. PL itself had been formed from a left split from the extremely reformist Communist Party in the direction of Maoism.
The context of widespread leftward movement, fueled not least by opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft, and the politically open character of SDS provided an arena for revolutionary Marxists to struggle for our program. The RMC sought to take full advantage of this necessarily time-limited situation in winning young would-be revolutionaries to Marxism. To this end, we put forward position papers and resolutions arguing for the program of revolutionary proletarian internationalism. We fought for Marxism as a program for the liberation of all of humanity, especially highlighting the need for a materialist program to confront the oppression of women and blacks (see also "Racial Oppression and Working-Class Politics," WV No. 897,31 August 2007).
This position paper also mentions in passing the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and Independent Socialist Clubs (ISC). The former was the youth organization of the Socialist Workers Party, a once Trotskyist organization by then degenerated into reformism—as exemplified by its leading role in the class-collaborationist National Peace Action Coalition. The Coalition's purpose was to appeal to liberal Democratic Party politicians who sought to extricate American imperialism from the losing colonial war in Vietnam and to head off a challenge to the capitalist order at home. The ISC were a left split from the Cold Warriors of the Socialist Party who purveyed the same anti-Sovietism with different trappings. Today, readers will recognize them as the still rabidly anti-Communist and helplessly liberal International Socialist Organization.
* * * *
I. SDS and Women's Liberation
SDS needs a clear, accurate class analysis of the special oppression of women and a Marxist program for women's liberation. No other radical youth group has yet undertaken this task. The YSA substitutes enthusiastic tail-ending for program; the ISC in their Statement of Principles patronizingly caters to the separatist mood by telling women that socialist revolution won't solve their problems automatically—as if other sorts of oppression would disappear without the intervention of consciousness?
The existing women's liberation movement, both liberal and radical, seems to see sex as the basic "class division" in society. This low level of theoretical development means an opportunity for Marxists to intervene with a working-class line. However, we will render our intervention useless if we cling to an oversimplified analysis that the only form of oppression is class oppression and confine our interest to the economic superexploitation of women workers.
The class question is the decisive issue in class society. However, other additional types of oppression do exist as well
—e.g., racial oppression, national oppression, women's oppression. To deny that Marxist revolutionaries must concern themselves with these issues is sectarian and blatantly anti-Leninist It is vital that revolutionaries participate in these struggles. The basis of such participation must be the realization that the class question is decisive and thus any movement which fails to identify itself with the struggle of the working class against the capitalist class is doomed to be beset by utopianism, crackpotism, liberal illusions and—ultimately—irrelevance.
The SDS resolution (which was sponsored by the WSA caucus and opposed by us) passed by our June convention (after the walk-out of the RYM [Revolutionary Youth Movement] splitters) did not provide a correct analysis or program. This failure was primarily due to an anti-historical, unMarxist method which resulted in an entirely incorrect position on the family.
II. Oppression and the Family
The June WSA resolution included the following statement: "The family does not have to be primarily reactionary. We should attempt to attack the bourgeois aspect and make the family a unit for fighting the ruling class."
This statement is flatly wrong. It ignores, in a crude anti-theoretical manner, the entire thrust of the Marxian critique of the family in order to accept as potentially revolutionary an institution which is inherently reactionary. The family can no more become a unit for fighting capitalism than can racial segregation, which is also a bourgeois institution. Both of these socio-economic institutions are oppressive and help maintain the capitalist system. Both are tools by which the ruling class maintains and strengthens false consciousness in the working class.
As a pro-working-class student organization, SDS must provide a Marxian class analysis of the social oppression of women. The primary source document for this analysis is The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in which Frederick Engels traces the history of the increasing oppression of women through the various stages of economic development of society, showing that the appearance of private property brought with it the necessity of transferring this property through inheritance. From this flows the need to trace descent; and since the male, in the primitive division of labor, had come to be the property-owner, he is therefore given the right to exclusive sexual access to the bearer of his children. Hence, the institution of marriage emerges.
Following the method of Engels, examining the oppression of women in class society and the nature of class society itself, we must seek its roots in the primitive division of labor, which resulted in the social division of man and woman, placing the latter in a subordinate position, as class society was born. Subsequently the class divisions transcended the sexual division, and class became the dominant reality of society. To put it another way, Mrs. Rockefeller and her maid both suffer in varying degree from the pervasive oppression of females and have some issues in common, but the maid has more in common with her own husband than with Mrs. Rockefeller.
Sexual divisions continue to be socially enforced, since they bolster the capitalist system. The social inferiority of women is maintained by the entire structure of class society, including its ideologies. Many women internalize and come to believe the false ideas of class culture, and actually feel themselves to be inferior. Women today tend to be "under-achievers"; feeling rightly that there is not much future for them, they waste their talents and energies on trivialities, decide to live through their families or succumb to despair. It is our task to offer to these women a worthwhile goal: their own liberation, which cannot be a personal "self-liberation" but requires a socialist revolution and the withering away of the family. As communist revolutionaries, further, these women will lead incomparably richer lives. They will come to understand their own oppression and the origins,
the nature and the future of the family. As stated by Engels:
"We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed will disappear just as surely as those of its complement, prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual, a man, and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and no other.
"For this purpose the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, inheritable wealth, the means of production, into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting.... The position of men will be very much altered, but the position of women, of att women, also undergoes significant change. With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike whether or not they are, in bourgeois legal jargon, legitimate."
This is far from advocating that straw man of the bosses' press, that under communism men and women will live in separate barracks and all children will be brought up in a state orphanage. We are rather advocating the replacement of marriage as a compulsory economic unit with voluntary forms better suited to people's physical and emotional needs. Since the institution of the family is an integral part of the capitalist system, the struggle for women's liberation is inseparable from the struggle for a socialist revolution.
III. The Family and the Class
The WSA resolution states: "With the rise of capitalism and modern industry, the economic foundation on which the traditional family was based was destroyed. Women were taken out of the home and put into the factory. But the special exploitation of women, who became a cheap reserve labor force, continued. To justify the double exploitation of women workers, the ruling class fostered the ideology of male chauvinism."
To set the record straight, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution women and children formed the bulk of the industrial proletariat. The reasons for this are well established. Women and children were cheap, unskilled, docile labor used by the rising capitalists to batter down the wages of men (usually more highly paid) and to destroy the craft industries employing (relatively) highly paid male artisans. To quote Marx in Capital:
"The value of labor power was determined not only by the labor-time necessary to maintain the individual adult laborer, but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of the family into the labor market, spreads the value of man's labor-power over his whole family. It thus depreciates his labor power."
Consequently, workers with large families were often given preference by the early capitalists who, as a matter of fact, often compelled the worker to require his entire family to work in his factory or lose his job.
The bourgeoisie of this period actually devised ideological apologia for femaie and child labor (see Jurgen Kuczynski, The Rise of the Working Class, Chapter 2, "The Working Class Emerges"). The limitation of female and child labor (by, e.g., the Factory Acts in Britain) represented concessions wrested by the "working class from capital. The progressive withdrawal of this super-exploited labor from the factory system compelled the capitalists to employ machinery in their stead if they wished to remain in business.
The destruction of the traditional family by employing women and children in production creates the possibility of founding the relationship between the sexes on a new economic basis. But, the spontaneous way this employment developed with the rise of capital was, to quote Marx, "a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery" which the advanced sections of the working class fought. The kernel of this contradiction is that under capitalism the family remains—because there is no other socio-economic institution to replace it.
An Institution of Indoctrination
The bourgeoisie and its theorists tinkered with the old institutions in order to fit them better into the new industrial capitalism. In the age of disintegrating feudalism, before the capitalists had accumulated much experience in running their own system, some of them even toyed with very radical ideas regarding the state, family and religion. They soon learned, however, that whether they themselves liked conventional family life or not, or whether they believed in God or not, the institutions of religion and the family were indispensable for inculcating the required docility, submissiveness, respect for authority and superstition in the working class. Without religion and the family the workers would be far more likely to become troublesome. For this reason the bourgeoisie learned to pay public obeisance to the ideals of religion and the family whether they personally believed in them or not. When economically necessary, the capitalist class will tolerate and even encourage female and child labor—but without allowing the development of institutions to replace the family. The working woman is not really freed from her role as household slave by obtaining work outside the home; she merely has one responsibility added to another.
Although individual families were destroyed—and are being destroyed—by capitalism, the family as an institution was not hurt, as it rises or falls with the existence of private property. When economic considerations permitted, the ruling class periodically initiated campaigns, through the media and the churches, to get women back into the home. This tendency reached a peak of brutal chauvinism and cynical barbarism with the Nazi slogan, "Kinder, Kiiche, Kirche," which portrays the woman deluded by religion and as breeder, babysitter and cook. "The family that prays together stays together": both religion and the family are bourgeois institutions of false consciousness.
Functions of the Family
Women and children left the process of production, not chiefly because the capitalists feared for the nuclear family and forced them out but in large part because under capitalism no substitute for the family is available. The domestic labor performed by the housewife has no exchange value, and the family is socially necessary to maintain the working class. The necessity of the bourgeoisie to concentrate and transfer its wealth via inheritance makes the family an ideological necessity for capitalism. Also, the struggle by the working class to limit the exploitation of women and children necessarily caused production to become more capital-intensive, hence ultimately raising the standard of living of the entire working class while in the long run diminishing the amount of labor needed in production.
In the present period, a period of capitalism in decay, there simply are not enough jobs to go around. Women, because of the domestic role they of necessity (under capitalism) must more or less fulfill, are on the fringes of the reserve army of the working class. When they are needed in production (such as World War II) the capitalists have no compunctions about the sanctity of hearth and home, and will gladly hire them to do "men's" work and will just as gladly drop them from production when they are no longer needed. (An unemployed male ex-soldiery would be a far greater threat to the bourgeois order than the more docile women unemployed workers.)
The hollow satisfactions of male supremacy within the home oppress both the men and the women and encourage false consciousness (male chauvinism). By way of comparison, segregation is similarly a tool of oppression (the hollow satisfactions of white supremacy in the U.S. encourage whites to oppress blacks) and false consciousness (racism). The working man learns to direct his anger and frustrations against his wife, rather than against the bosses. He is told that he is the boss in his own home ("a man's home is his castle"). Thus, the family as an economic and social institution is a shackle on the consciousness of the men workers as well as that of women,
The Family in Non-Capitalist States
The family serves its reactionary function not only in capitalist societies but also in the bureaucratically-deformed workers' states—i.e., Russia, China, and those other nations which have abolished the material basis of the family—private property—but which still require the family as a socio-cultural institution in order to suppress the consciousness of the masses, rendering them subservient to the parasitic bureaucracies headed by Brezhnev & Co., Mao, etc.
For example, the initial effect of the Chinese revolution—which in its need to fight imperialism found itself completing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and establishing the property relations of a workers' state—was the unleashing of an immensely progressive social force. The feudal oppression of women was abolished. But in the absence of workers' democracy in China, policy is determined by the whim of the Maoist bureaucracy. Hence, the ambivalent attitude toward the family: thus the bureaucracy opposed birth control during the Great Leap Forward; today they encourage long periods of celibacy for the Chinese youth.
The survival of most features of bourgeois family life within the non-capitalist world simultaneously reveals something about both the family and the nature of these societies. The bourgeois family is still the family, similar in decisive respects to the family in non-capitalist but not classless (e.g., feudal and slave) societies. The family unit represents a division of social labor far older than capitalism, dating back to the first "class" division of labor, that between man and woman. As such, the family will require more than the abolition of capitalism (in and of itself) before it is superseded entirely by a freer system of relations between men and women, parents and children. Needless to say, the overthrow of the capitalists and their state by the regime of workers' power is absolutely essential to the liberation of individuals from the narrowness, authoritarianism and sexual inequality inherent in family life. But we should recognize that this task will not be fatty accomplished until the dictatorship of the proletariat has fulfilled its historic mission: until class distinctions and their vestiges have been eradicated from society, i.e., mankind has reached the stage of classless society, communism. The same holds true for other features of class societies in general—aspects not simply peculiar to capitalism, such as the need for a state power over society, the existence of a certain amount of religious superstition, what Marx called "the idiocy of rural life," etc.
No society could today be entirely free of the dark heritage of the family with its sexual oppression and shut-in, stultifying life for the children. What is most repugnant to any revolutionist about family life in the deformed workers' states, however, is the feet that the political elite ruling these societies presents the survival of an archaic and reactionary institution as a great achievement in building socialism! The Bolsheviks in Lenin's time never glorified the family as an instrument—real or potential—for revolutionary socialist struggle and development. As far as the miserably insufficient level of Russian economy and culture permitted, they passed laws and created institutions designed to free Soviet citizens, particularly the women and children, from the oppressive and stultifying influence of the family. All this was of course reversed with the advent of Stalin's bureaucratic regime, which continues on to this day. After wiping out the left wing of the Communist Party and stripping the Soviets of power, the Stalinized regime proceeded to make divorce more difficult, illegalized abortion, enhanced parental authority, and worst of all called this adaptation to brutal barefoot Russian medievalism—socialism! For reasons which Stalinists find difficult to explain, the Soviet Great Leap Backward in policy regarding women and the family was led by the same parasitic gang who murdered the Old Bolsheviks of all viewpoints, throttled the Spanish revolution and let Hitler take power without firing a shot Just as Stalin was willing to use Great Russian chauvinism against national minorities, praise the Orthodox Church and foster anti-Semitism, so he found that the backward Russian family created a base for his bureaucratic and authoritarian aims. Even where private property no longer exists, the institution of the family serves—at best—to hinder the development of a socialist society. At worst it provides a base of support in the culture for the parasitic bureaucrats who barter away the gains of the revolution. SDS cannot wish away the social and cultural significance of the family by words about making it "a unit for fighting the ruling class." Reactionary institutions serve reactionary ends.
IV. The Working Woman
The economic aspects of the inferior position of women in our society provide the most immediate benefits to capitalism. Whenever capital needs to draw women out into the labor force, it has been able to use the ideology of male superiority to justify the super-exploitation of women workers—that is, women being paid less for doing the same work as the men. After all, "a woman's place is in the home," "a man has the responsibility of supporting a family, a woman only works because she wants to."
The assumption is that the woman's main role is that of the tender mother; hence, she is forced to take care of her children, even if they are unwanted, even when she is divorced. Any woman who wants more out of life is termed "unnatural" or "unfit." The lie is pushed that women are fit only for domestic chores and that therefore their labor is not worth as much as the labor of men.
Women make up one third of the American labor force, but the wages of the full-time working woman average only 60% of those of the average male working full-time. The non-white working woman, suffering under a double load of exploitation and oppression, must indeed be the most victimized category in American capitalist society. In itself, the lower average income of women workers roughly indicates the degree of their oppression, not their super-exploitation relative to working men. (They might—and do—take home less money because they are concentrated in less productive jobs.) But women, even more than other oppressed groups such as Black male workers, frequently receive less for work identical to that performed by more highly paid men. In addition to suffering oppression and discrimination, working -women are super-exploited in the literal and technical sense of the term.
Militancy or Passivity?
In the months ahead, many SDS members expect to have jobs, either full-time or temporary, in factories, on campus, in offices and hospitals, wherever labor struggles are going on. Those of us involved in assisting striking unions will be able to establish contacts with workers on the picket lines. As socialists, we must support the working class in its struggles and seek to raise consciousness, pointing out that male chauvinism divides the workers, that lower wages for women means lower wages for everyone. In Britain, where unions have calculated that wages would increase 11% if women received the same pay as men, equal pay for equal work has become a major union demand. In the U.S., a related process of awakening is going on.
Male chauvinism has made many women workers passive in accepting their lower wages and generally poorer working conditions. Many women are convinced that it isn't "ladylike" or "feminine" to be really militant, that political activity is only for men, that the picket line is too dangerous a place for women. These attitudes serve the bosses and most be fought Radicals should encourage militancy among women workers and relate women's oppression to the oppression and alienation that all workers experience under capitalism. Thus, women's liberation has an important role to play in the struggles of the working class. Further, situations sometimes arise where the women—because they are more oppressed by poor working conditions, low wages and speed-up—are more militant than the men. Women are not pale, fragile, helpless creatures; as workers engaged in industrial production, they can wield workers' power!
V. Male Chauvinism in the Student Movement
The student movement is infected with male chauvinism, a bourgeois ideology, as is the rest of society under capitalism. Long ago most of us faced up to our own deeply imbedded racist attitudes and began to conquer them. Now we must root out our male chauvinism as carefully. Here we are dealing with the social and psychological forms of discrimination rather than the economic aspects of male chauvinism. We must recognize also that no one—including our women members—is automatically exempt from male chauvinist attitudes. We must, by scrupulous attention to the content of a pro-women's liberation position, prevent the subject from becoming a bandwagon which intimidates free political debate in SDS the way that some Black hustlers have sought to racist-bait other radicals into accepting their positions as gospel.
Male chauvinism—perhaps a misleading term since it tends to obscure the feet that women's male chauvinist attitudes can oppress them or other women—has hurt the radical movement. Many potentially radical women are unwilling to join an organization which they believe is indifferent to women's oppression, It is a fact that a good number of the ersatz, crackpot and separatist tendencies in the existing women's liberation groups are a reaction to the male chauvinism in the student movement. These groups blur over class lines and stress "individual liberation" and other Utopian schemes.
Many of the women who do enter radical politics tend to play supportive roles and are not encouraged to develop politically or exercise leadership. SDS must rid itself of male chauvinism and utilize the full talents of all its members.
VI. SDS and Special Groups
It is not enough to fight individual aspects of women's oppression within the labor movement and in SDS. Separate women's liberation groups offer an opportunity to tie together all aspects of women's oppression in the minds of their members, and hence to suggest a single solution—which is socialism. As Marxists, we recognize that special oppression calls for special defensive and combative organizations of the oppressed. For this reason, SDS should give critical support (determined by program) to Black groups which fight the special oppression of Black people; similarly SDS should support women's groups which fight on the basis of a Marxist program for the special needs of women.
Armed with a more developed political and economic analysis of society, SDS members should be able to win the more serious groups away from petty-bourgeois amateur therapy sessions, liberalism, female separatism and vicarious anti-male terrorism, to a working-class perspective. Women's liberation groups are a good arena for winning militant 'women over to SDS and to socialism.
VII. Program for Women's Liberation
When SDS members make a political entry into a special group such as a women's liberation group, they should be armed with a program that raises consciousness by relating specific felt needs to the broader struggle for socialism. We carry through this program by raising a series of transitional demands—that is, demands which flow from the specific struggle but which lead the struggle to a higher level of militancy and political
sophistication.
We move that SDS accept the following program for struggle and agitate around the following demands:
For the abolition of family restrictions;
1. Abolition of abortion laws; each woman must be free to make her own decisions.
2. Free abortions, as part of demand for free quality medical care for everybody, so poor women will have the same freedom of choice as middle-class women.
3. Freely available birth control devices and information.
4. Free full-time child-care facilities for all children, the expenses to be borne by the employer or the state. Free pre-natal, maternity and post-natal care with no loss in pay for time off.
5. Establishment of free voluntary cafeterias in the factories and other places of work.
6. Divorce at the request of either partner. Abolition of alimony. Expenses for children to be paid by the state.
7. Lower the legal age of adulthood to 16. State stipend for schooling or training for any child who wishes to leave home. Free education for all children, with housing, food and stipend. No loco parentis. Student-teacher-worker control of all schools and colleges.
To fight the super-exploitation of women workers:
8. Full and equal pay for equal work.
9. Equal work: equal access to all job categories. Shorter work week with no loss in pay ("30 for 40") to eliminate unemployment at the capitalists* expense.
To fight male chauvinism:
10. An end to all forms of discrimination—legal, political, social and cultural.
SDS should seek the creation of a non-exclusionist class-conscious women's liberation organization in which SDS members can participate and struggle on the basis of the above program. Toward this end, we should direct interested SDS members to seek to initiate, along with other radical women, a nationally-oriented women's liberation publication.
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
*From The "In Defense Of Marxism" Website- "Women's Struggle And Class Struggle"- A Guest Commentary
Click on the headline to link to the "In Defense Of Marxism" Website for the above-titled article, dated March 8, 2010, in honor of the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.
Markin comment:
Anytime one can get a literate, thoughtful analysis of one of our important international workers' holidays then one should, as here, take full advantage of it. We will fight out the political differences of the way forward for the women's liberation struggle, if any, along the way.
Markin comment:
Anytime one can get a literate, thoughtful analysis of one of our important international workers' holidays then one should, as here, take full advantage of it. We will fight out the political differences of the way forward for the women's liberation struggle, if any, along the way.
Monday, March 11, 2019
From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-For Free, Safe Abortion on Demand!
Workers Vanguard No. 975
4 March 2011
Democrats, Republicans Attack Women’s Rights
For Free, Safe Abortion on Demand!
For decades Democrats, liberals and feminists have offered up one concession after another that have whittled away abortion rights and emboldened the anti-abortion bigots, who have in turn launched a renewed legislative offensive. In state after state, Republican politicians have introduced bills aiming to eliminate abortion rights, while reactionary “right to life” outfits have launched a vicious campaign against Planned Parenthood to further limit access to abortion.
The attacks have not just come from crazed right-wing Republican politicians intent on reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Not long after Roe, the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976 under Democratic Party president Jimmy Carter, excluded abortion from federal health care services provided to low-income people. Obama’s health care “reform” was in line with the Hyde Amendment, which eliminated abortion coverage from Medicaid. Many often vote for the Democratic Party largely on the basis that it would defend Roe v. Wade in the courts. But, as one concession after another has been made, including restricting late-term abortions, pro-Democratic outfits such as the National Organization for Women have limited their actions to “fight the right” electoral tactics even as abortion rights continue to be axed.
Already, at least 38 states have “fetal homicide” laws. In Utah, women can be charged with criminal homicide for obtaining an illegal abortion or inducing a miscarriage, including through “reckless” behavior. The law was prompted by the tragic case of a desperate 17-year-old who paid a man to beat her in the hopes of inducing a miscarriage. Anti-abortion bigots are now looking to replicate a Nebraska law that virtually bans all abortions at 20 weeks after conception. Across the country, bills are being introduced to force women seeking abortions to view ultrasounds of the fetus—as is already the law in Oklahoma—and to ban any abortion coverage by private insurance companies. In Georgia, a Republican state legislator has introduced a bill that would make abortion the legal equivalent of murder and force the criminal investigation of women who suffer miscarriages. In South Dakota and Nebraska bills were introduced to allow the use of “justifiable homicide” as a defense for the murder of abortion providers.
Through violence, intimidation and bipartisan legal assaults, the legal right to abortion in the U.S. is severely constricted. If you live in one of the many areas where no providers exist, you have little “choice,” unless you have the time and money to travel. Some 87 percent of U.S. counties and 31 percent of metropolitan areas have no abortion services. The panoply of anti-abortion laws and restrictions on birth control particularly targets young, working-class and poor women. The wealthy will always get their medical care, including abortions, whether legal or not.
Seeking to further curtail access to abortion, anti-woman bigots are now targeting Planned Parenthood, which provides essential medical services of all kinds especially to young, working-class and minority women; one in five women will use Planned Parenthood sometime in her life. Scandal-mongering videotapes made by “Live Action,” a reactionary anti-abortion outfit, portrayed a man and woman posing as a pimp and young prostitute seeking health services including abortion, showing them receiving advice from Planned Parenthood workers in various locations. Stirring up the sex panic ever roiling the surface of American politics, the videos set off a wave of Puritanical vapors and hand-wringing, as intended, including among supposed defenders of women’s rights.
Planned Parenthood’s response to this sting operation was cringing. Amy Woodruff, manager of their Perth Amboy, New Jersey, clinic, did her job, giving common-sense advice to the people in the video. This included reassurances of confidentiality, how to evade legal complications and useful health tips (like only “waist up” sexual activity for two weeks after an abortion). But amid the furor, Planned Parenthood fired her, setting a dangerous precedent for others who may need such advice in the future. There is now at least one bill before Congress calling to bar government funding to Planned Parenthood. For our part, we agree with the gossip Web site Gawker’s February 4 headline: “Even Teen Hookers Need Abortions.” We call for the abolition of all laws against “crimes without victims,” which include drug use and prostitution. We oppose “squeal rules” and all other restrictions on abortion directed at minors.
The anti-Planned Parenthood scam recalls the operation launched by right-wing yahoos against the liberal community organizing group ACORN, whose main “crime” was to register poor people and minorities to vote. Despite its close ties to the Democratic Party, Democrats joined with Republicans in voting to defund it, leading to its dissolution.
At its most extreme, bloody and reactionary, the anti-abortion campaign has meant the murder of abortion providers, such as Dr. George Tiller in 2009. Dr. Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, Kansas, now closed, was one of only three in the entire country that provided late-term abortions. Between 1993 and 1998 anti-abortion terrorists murdered seven people for providing abortions: Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida, in 1993; Dr. John Britton, along with a clinic escort, in Pensacola a year later; Lee Ann Nichols and Shannon Lowney at a clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1994; a security guard in a 1998 Birmingham, Alabama, firebombing that also severely wounded a nurse; and Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo, New York, killed by a sniper outside his home in 1998.
The organized labor movement has every interest in fighting for the rights of women. Such a struggle must be waged independently of all capitalist parties as part of the fight for free, quality health care for all, as well as for free, 24-hour childcare, which would address the deep class and racial oppression of poor and minority women. For free abortion on demand!
War on Women, War on Workers
It is no accident that anti-woman attacks have escalated at the same time that the ruling class has undertaken a vicious union-busting offensive, seeking to get rid of nearly every “overhead” associated with the most minimal social safety net. Not only abortion rights, but also funding for medical research, family planning and reproductive health care services for women are being slashed to the bone. This includes the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers and infants each month. Likewise, there are proposals to slash grants for prenatal heath care to low-income women—cuts proposed in various degrees by both capitalist parties. The late, great comedian George Carlin, who famously quipped that “not every ejaculation deserves a name,” caught the hypocrisy of abortion opponents: “They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own.”
In such a climate, the recent scandal over a West Philadelphia clinic throws a light on the wretched “services,” such as they exist, that many poor people get. Two women died and many more were mutilated in botched abortion procedures by one Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his ill-trained staff, according to a January Philadelphia grand jury report. Officials had ignored medical complaints about the clinic since at least 1993, and it hadn’t been inspected by health officials for 16 years. Filthy and dangerous, the clinic was, according to the grand jury report, responsible for many injuries to women, including infections and perforated bowels and uteruses.
The state, of course, has gone after Gosnell for performing late-term abortions—abortion after 24 weeks is a crime in Pennsylvania. He is being charged with eight counts of murder, seven of them for aborting late-term fetuses, which should be no crime. It is the anti-woman laws and desperate conditions that force poor, black and immigrant women into such squalid back-alley operations. In the Mantua neighborhood of West Philadelphia, where Gosnell’s operation was located, over 16,000 people live below the poverty line. In all of West Philadelphia, the infant mortality rate resembles that of a Third World country: 15 per 1,000 live births. This is more than double the national rate, which is itself the highest rate of the 33 countries that the New York Times (26 February) described as having “advanced economies.” In West Philly, low birth weight is a major problem. For the women living there, abortion—normally a simple procedure that is safer than childbirth—is not always safe, not always legal and certainly not affordable. Many women have trouble getting the money together quickly, and young women especially are often pounded with guilt by repressive parents, violent boyfriends or hellfire preachers, so they end up having their abortions only at the last moment.
Religious scam artists ply their trade not only in the evangelical Christian bible belt. In Manhattan recently, a Texas-based group called “Life Always” put up a billboard about a half-mile from a Planned Parenthood facility. As part of its national campaign targeting minority neighborhoods, the billboard showed the picture of a little black girl with the grotesque message: “The most dangerous place for African Americans is in the womb.” The billboard went up on February 22; two days later, it was taken down, having outraged much of the city, not least the black populace. Life Always’ pastor, Stephen Broden, ranted: “The survival of our country, our nation is tied to the woman’s womb! And if we are assaulting that womb, if we are attacking that womb, we are on a path to self-destruction!” Such is the repulsive pathology of these bigots, to whom women are destined to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen forever.
Lord knows that Obama rarely passes up the opportunity to reaffirm his credentials as a true believer in the Christian faith. Covering for him, the reformist International Socialist Organization wrote an article on the West Philly case, “Like Roe Never Happened” (Socialist Worker, 25 January), that roundly denounced the right for its attacks on abortion rights but made not one mention of President Obama or the Democratic Party.
For Women’s Liberation Through International Socialist Revolution!
Tens of thousands of women across the world die each year from illegal abortions. Some researchers estimate that in Latin America and the Caribbean the primary cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 39 is complications from illegal abortions. Poverty and backwardness, enforced around the globe by imperialist domination, mean that the infrastructure necessary to bring basic medical care, contraception and abortion to Third World women is simply not there. Nor will it ever be, short of the destruction of the capitalist system by victorious working-class revolution and the establishment of proletarian state rule. It is precisely the hold of religious obscurantism, anti-homosexual bigotry and the treatment of women as simply the bearers of—and those responsible for rearing—the next generation that must be eradicated by laying the material basis for the full equality of the sexes.
The fight for women’s liberation is a necessary part of the struggle for the emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed masses throughout the world. The main source of women’s oppression is the institution of the family. As we noted in our article, “Fifty Years After the Pill: Still a Long Way to Go” (WV No. 968, 5 November 2010):
“The war on abortion rights has become a spearhead for social and political reaction because at its heart lies the question of legal and social equality for women. Providing women with some control over whether or not to have children, abortion is viewed as a threat to the institution of the family….
“The capitalist class seeks to buttress the family, which, along with organized religion and the state, form a triad that props up the exploitation of labor. To free women from their deeply entrenched special oppression will take a workers revolution to rip this system of exploitation out by the roots and replace it with a workers government to begin the construction of a socialist world.”
Referring to the early Soviet workers republic, Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, wrote in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): “The revolutionary power gave women the right to abortion, which in conditions of want and family distress, whatever may be said upon this subject by the eunuchs and old maids of both sexes, is one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights.” It is this vision of socialist freedom that we continue to stand on today.
4 March 2011
Democrats, Republicans Attack Women’s Rights
For Free, Safe Abortion on Demand!
For decades Democrats, liberals and feminists have offered up one concession after another that have whittled away abortion rights and emboldened the anti-abortion bigots, who have in turn launched a renewed legislative offensive. In state after state, Republican politicians have introduced bills aiming to eliminate abortion rights, while reactionary “right to life” outfits have launched a vicious campaign against Planned Parenthood to further limit access to abortion.
The attacks have not just come from crazed right-wing Republican politicians intent on reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. Not long after Roe, the Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976 under Democratic Party president Jimmy Carter, excluded abortion from federal health care services provided to low-income people. Obama’s health care “reform” was in line with the Hyde Amendment, which eliminated abortion coverage from Medicaid. Many often vote for the Democratic Party largely on the basis that it would defend Roe v. Wade in the courts. But, as one concession after another has been made, including restricting late-term abortions, pro-Democratic outfits such as the National Organization for Women have limited their actions to “fight the right” electoral tactics even as abortion rights continue to be axed.
Already, at least 38 states have “fetal homicide” laws. In Utah, women can be charged with criminal homicide for obtaining an illegal abortion or inducing a miscarriage, including through “reckless” behavior. The law was prompted by the tragic case of a desperate 17-year-old who paid a man to beat her in the hopes of inducing a miscarriage. Anti-abortion bigots are now looking to replicate a Nebraska law that virtually bans all abortions at 20 weeks after conception. Across the country, bills are being introduced to force women seeking abortions to view ultrasounds of the fetus—as is already the law in Oklahoma—and to ban any abortion coverage by private insurance companies. In Georgia, a Republican state legislator has introduced a bill that would make abortion the legal equivalent of murder and force the criminal investigation of women who suffer miscarriages. In South Dakota and Nebraska bills were introduced to allow the use of “justifiable homicide” as a defense for the murder of abortion providers.
Through violence, intimidation and bipartisan legal assaults, the legal right to abortion in the U.S. is severely constricted. If you live in one of the many areas where no providers exist, you have little “choice,” unless you have the time and money to travel. Some 87 percent of U.S. counties and 31 percent of metropolitan areas have no abortion services. The panoply of anti-abortion laws and restrictions on birth control particularly targets young, working-class and poor women. The wealthy will always get their medical care, including abortions, whether legal or not.
Seeking to further curtail access to abortion, anti-woman bigots are now targeting Planned Parenthood, which provides essential medical services of all kinds especially to young, working-class and minority women; one in five women will use Planned Parenthood sometime in her life. Scandal-mongering videotapes made by “Live Action,” a reactionary anti-abortion outfit, portrayed a man and woman posing as a pimp and young prostitute seeking health services including abortion, showing them receiving advice from Planned Parenthood workers in various locations. Stirring up the sex panic ever roiling the surface of American politics, the videos set off a wave of Puritanical vapors and hand-wringing, as intended, including among supposed defenders of women’s rights.
Planned Parenthood’s response to this sting operation was cringing. Amy Woodruff, manager of their Perth Amboy, New Jersey, clinic, did her job, giving common-sense advice to the people in the video. This included reassurances of confidentiality, how to evade legal complications and useful health tips (like only “waist up” sexual activity for two weeks after an abortion). But amid the furor, Planned Parenthood fired her, setting a dangerous precedent for others who may need such advice in the future. There is now at least one bill before Congress calling to bar government funding to Planned Parenthood. For our part, we agree with the gossip Web site Gawker’s February 4 headline: “Even Teen Hookers Need Abortions.” We call for the abolition of all laws against “crimes without victims,” which include drug use and prostitution. We oppose “squeal rules” and all other restrictions on abortion directed at minors.
The anti-Planned Parenthood scam recalls the operation launched by right-wing yahoos against the liberal community organizing group ACORN, whose main “crime” was to register poor people and minorities to vote. Despite its close ties to the Democratic Party, Democrats joined with Republicans in voting to defund it, leading to its dissolution.
At its most extreme, bloody and reactionary, the anti-abortion campaign has meant the murder of abortion providers, such as Dr. George Tiller in 2009. Dr. Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, Kansas, now closed, was one of only three in the entire country that provided late-term abortions. Between 1993 and 1998 anti-abortion terrorists murdered seven people for providing abortions: Dr. David Gunn in Pensacola, Florida, in 1993; Dr. John Britton, along with a clinic escort, in Pensacola a year later; Lee Ann Nichols and Shannon Lowney at a clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1994; a security guard in a 1998 Birmingham, Alabama, firebombing that also severely wounded a nurse; and Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo, New York, killed by a sniper outside his home in 1998.
The organized labor movement has every interest in fighting for the rights of women. Such a struggle must be waged independently of all capitalist parties as part of the fight for free, quality health care for all, as well as for free, 24-hour childcare, which would address the deep class and racial oppression of poor and minority women. For free abortion on demand!
War on Women, War on Workers
It is no accident that anti-woman attacks have escalated at the same time that the ruling class has undertaken a vicious union-busting offensive, seeking to get rid of nearly every “overhead” associated with the most minimal social safety net. Not only abortion rights, but also funding for medical research, family planning and reproductive health care services for women are being slashed to the bone. This includes the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, which serves 9.6 million low-income women, new mothers and infants each month. Likewise, there are proposals to slash grants for prenatal heath care to low-income women—cuts proposed in various degrees by both capitalist parties. The late, great comedian George Carlin, who famously quipped that “not every ejaculation deserves a name,” caught the hypocrisy of abortion opponents: “They will do anything for the unborn. But once you’re born, you’re on your own.”
In such a climate, the recent scandal over a West Philadelphia clinic throws a light on the wretched “services,” such as they exist, that many poor people get. Two women died and many more were mutilated in botched abortion procedures by one Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his ill-trained staff, according to a January Philadelphia grand jury report. Officials had ignored medical complaints about the clinic since at least 1993, and it hadn’t been inspected by health officials for 16 years. Filthy and dangerous, the clinic was, according to the grand jury report, responsible for many injuries to women, including infections and perforated bowels and uteruses.
The state, of course, has gone after Gosnell for performing late-term abortions—abortion after 24 weeks is a crime in Pennsylvania. He is being charged with eight counts of murder, seven of them for aborting late-term fetuses, which should be no crime. It is the anti-woman laws and desperate conditions that force poor, black and immigrant women into such squalid back-alley operations. In the Mantua neighborhood of West Philadelphia, where Gosnell’s operation was located, over 16,000 people live below the poverty line. In all of West Philadelphia, the infant mortality rate resembles that of a Third World country: 15 per 1,000 live births. This is more than double the national rate, which is itself the highest rate of the 33 countries that the New York Times (26 February) described as having “advanced economies.” In West Philly, low birth weight is a major problem. For the women living there, abortion—normally a simple procedure that is safer than childbirth—is not always safe, not always legal and certainly not affordable. Many women have trouble getting the money together quickly, and young women especially are often pounded with guilt by repressive parents, violent boyfriends or hellfire preachers, so they end up having their abortions only at the last moment.
Religious scam artists ply their trade not only in the evangelical Christian bible belt. In Manhattan recently, a Texas-based group called “Life Always” put up a billboard about a half-mile from a Planned Parenthood facility. As part of its national campaign targeting minority neighborhoods, the billboard showed the picture of a little black girl with the grotesque message: “The most dangerous place for African Americans is in the womb.” The billboard went up on February 22; two days later, it was taken down, having outraged much of the city, not least the black populace. Life Always’ pastor, Stephen Broden, ranted: “The survival of our country, our nation is tied to the woman’s womb! And if we are assaulting that womb, if we are attacking that womb, we are on a path to self-destruction!” Such is the repulsive pathology of these bigots, to whom women are destined to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen forever.
Lord knows that Obama rarely passes up the opportunity to reaffirm his credentials as a true believer in the Christian faith. Covering for him, the reformist International Socialist Organization wrote an article on the West Philly case, “Like Roe Never Happened” (Socialist Worker, 25 January), that roundly denounced the right for its attacks on abortion rights but made not one mention of President Obama or the Democratic Party.
For Women’s Liberation Through International Socialist Revolution!
Tens of thousands of women across the world die each year from illegal abortions. Some researchers estimate that in Latin America and the Caribbean the primary cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 39 is complications from illegal abortions. Poverty and backwardness, enforced around the globe by imperialist domination, mean that the infrastructure necessary to bring basic medical care, contraception and abortion to Third World women is simply not there. Nor will it ever be, short of the destruction of the capitalist system by victorious working-class revolution and the establishment of proletarian state rule. It is precisely the hold of religious obscurantism, anti-homosexual bigotry and the treatment of women as simply the bearers of—and those responsible for rearing—the next generation that must be eradicated by laying the material basis for the full equality of the sexes.
The fight for women’s liberation is a necessary part of the struggle for the emancipation of all the exploited and oppressed masses throughout the world. The main source of women’s oppression is the institution of the family. As we noted in our article, “Fifty Years After the Pill: Still a Long Way to Go” (WV No. 968, 5 November 2010):
“The war on abortion rights has become a spearhead for social and political reaction because at its heart lies the question of legal and social equality for women. Providing women with some control over whether or not to have children, abortion is viewed as a threat to the institution of the family….
“The capitalist class seeks to buttress the family, which, along with organized religion and the state, form a triad that props up the exploitation of labor. To free women from their deeply entrenched special oppression will take a workers revolution to rip this system of exploitation out by the roots and replace it with a workers government to begin the construction of a socialist world.”
Referring to the early Soviet workers republic, Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, wrote in The Revolution Betrayed (1936): “The revolutionary power gave women the right to abortion, which in conditions of want and family distress, whatever may be said upon this subject by the eunuchs and old maids of both sexes, is one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights.” It is this vision of socialist freedom that we continue to stand on today.
Saturday, March 09, 2019
*From The Pen Of Bolshevik Leader Alexandra Kollantai-"Women's Day, February 1913"
Click on title to link to the "Alexandra Kollontai Internet Archives" for the other works of 1917 Bolshevik secondary revolutionary leader Alexandra Kollantai.
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Kollontai's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, is eve truer today, much truer.
Markin comment:
No revolution can succeed without men and women of Kollontai's caliber. As Trotsky noted, on more than one occasion, the West, for lots of reason, in his day had not produced such cadre. I believe that observation, for the most part, is eve truer today, much truer.
Friday, March 08, 2019
*In Celebration of International Women’s Day- A Guest Commentary
Click on title to link to a Lenin commentary concerning the history of International Women's Day. and the struggle for women's liberation
Thursday, March 07, 2019
*Honor International Women's Day-A Workers' Holiday
Click on title to link to "A History In Words and Images Of International Women's Day".
This is a repost of a commentary for International Women's Day 2007
COMMENTARY
MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH-MARCH 8TH IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
MARCH 2007 (WESTERN DATES) MARKS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA STARTED ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY BY WOMEN TEXTILE WORKERS AND OTHER WOMEN DEMANDING BREAD AND PEACE, AMONG OTHER ISSUES DURING THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR I.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the journal Women and Revolution in 1975
"Under the lead of the Third International, the day of the working women shall become a real fighting day; it shall take the form of practical measures which either solidify the conquests of Communism ...or prepare the way for the dictatorship of the working class."
-
Alexandra Kollontai (early Bolshevik leader)
Bourgeois feminists may celebrate it, but March 8 —International Women's Day—is a workers' holiday. Originating in 1908 among the female needle trades workers in Manhattan's Lower East Side, who marched under the slogans "for an eight hour day," "for the end of child labor" and "equal suffrage for women," it was officially adopted by the Second International in 1911.
International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women's oppression and the program for emancipation.
The following year the Bolsheviks not only agitated for International Women's Day in the pages of Pravda (then publishing under the name Put' Pravdy), but also made preparations to publish a special journal dealing with questions of women's liberation in Russia and internationally. It was called Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), and its first issue was scheduled to appear on International Women's Day, 1914.
Preparations for the holiday were made under the most hazardous conditions. Shortly before the long-awaited day the entire editorial board of Rabotnitsa— with one exception—as well as other Bolsheviks who had agitated for International Women's Day in St. Petersburg factories, were arrested by the Tsarist police. Despite these arrests, however, the Bolsheviks pushed ahead with their preparations. Anna Elizarova —Lenin's sister and the one member of the editorial board to escape arrest—single-handedly brought out the first issue of Rabotnitsa on March 8 (or, according to the old Russian calendar, February 23) as scheduled. Clara Zetkin, a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and in the international working women's movement, wrote:
"Greetings to you on your courageous decision to organize Women's Day, congratulations to you for not losing courage and not wanting to sit by with your hands folded. We are with you, heart and soul. You and your movement will be remembered at numerous meetings organized for Women's Day in Germany, Austria, Hungary and America."
—Quoted in A. Artiukhina, "Proidennyi Put',"
Zhenshehina v revoliutsii
By far the most important celebration ever of International Women's Day took place in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers of that city led a strike of over 90,000 workers—a strike which signaled the end of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. One week afterward, Pravda commented:
"The first day of the revolution—that is the Women's Day, the day of the Women Workers' International. All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on their day."
As the position of Soviet women degenerated under Stalin and his successors, as part of the degeneration of the entire Soviet workers state, International Women's Day was transformed from a day of international proletarian solidarity into an empty ritual which, like Mother's Day in the United States, glorifies the traditional role of women within the family.
But International Women's Day is a celebration neither of motherhood nor sisterhood; to ignore this fact is to ignore the most significant aspects of its history and purpose, which was to strengthen the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. Unlike the pre-war Mensheviks who wanted to conciliate the feminists of their day by limiting the celebration of International Women's Day to women only, the Bolsheviks insisted that it be a holiday of working women and working men in struggle together. As Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife and life-long political companion) wrote in the lead article of the first issue of Rabotnitsa:
"That which unites working women with working men is stronger than that which divides them. They are united by their common lack of rights, their common needs, their common condition, which is struggle and their common goal.... Solidarity between working men and working women, common activity, a common goal, a common path to this goal—such is the solution of the 'woman' question among workers."
We look forward to celebrating future International Women's Days not only through the dissemination of propaganda, but also through the initiation of the full range of activities traditionally associated with this proletarian holiday—general strikes, insurrections, revolution!
This is a repost of a commentary for International Women's Day 2007
COMMENTARY
MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH-MARCH 8TH IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
MARCH 2007 (WESTERN DATES) MARKS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA STARTED ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY BY WOMEN TEXTILE WORKERS AND OTHER WOMEN DEMANDING BREAD AND PEACE, AMONG OTHER ISSUES DURING THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR I.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the journal Women and Revolution in 1975
"Under the lead of the Third International, the day of the working women shall become a real fighting day; it shall take the form of practical measures which either solidify the conquests of Communism ...or prepare the way for the dictatorship of the working class."
-
Alexandra Kollontai (early Bolshevik leader)
Bourgeois feminists may celebrate it, but March 8 —International Women's Day—is a workers' holiday. Originating in 1908 among the female needle trades workers in Manhattan's Lower East Side, who marched under the slogans "for an eight hour day," "for the end of child labor" and "equal suffrage for women," it was officially adopted by the Second International in 1911.
International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women's oppression and the program for emancipation.
The following year the Bolsheviks not only agitated for International Women's Day in the pages of Pravda (then publishing under the name Put' Pravdy), but also made preparations to publish a special journal dealing with questions of women's liberation in Russia and internationally. It was called Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), and its first issue was scheduled to appear on International Women's Day, 1914.
Preparations for the holiday were made under the most hazardous conditions. Shortly before the long-awaited day the entire editorial board of Rabotnitsa— with one exception—as well as other Bolsheviks who had agitated for International Women's Day in St. Petersburg factories, were arrested by the Tsarist police. Despite these arrests, however, the Bolsheviks pushed ahead with their preparations. Anna Elizarova —Lenin's sister and the one member of the editorial board to escape arrest—single-handedly brought out the first issue of Rabotnitsa on March 8 (or, according to the old Russian calendar, February 23) as scheduled. Clara Zetkin, a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and in the international working women's movement, wrote:
"Greetings to you on your courageous decision to organize Women's Day, congratulations to you for not losing courage and not wanting to sit by with your hands folded. We are with you, heart and soul. You and your movement will be remembered at numerous meetings organized for Women's Day in Germany, Austria, Hungary and America."
—Quoted in A. Artiukhina, "Proidennyi Put',"
Zhenshehina v revoliutsii
By far the most important celebration ever of International Women's Day took place in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers of that city led a strike of over 90,000 workers—a strike which signaled the end of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. One week afterward, Pravda commented:
"The first day of the revolution—that is the Women's Day, the day of the Women Workers' International. All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on their day."
As the position of Soviet women degenerated under Stalin and his successors, as part of the degeneration of the entire Soviet workers state, International Women's Day was transformed from a day of international proletarian solidarity into an empty ritual which, like Mother's Day in the United States, glorifies the traditional role of women within the family.
But International Women's Day is a celebration neither of motherhood nor sisterhood; to ignore this fact is to ignore the most significant aspects of its history and purpose, which was to strengthen the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. Unlike the pre-war Mensheviks who wanted to conciliate the feminists of their day by limiting the celebration of International Women's Day to women only, the Bolsheviks insisted that it be a holiday of working women and working men in struggle together. As Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife and life-long political companion) wrote in the lead article of the first issue of Rabotnitsa:
"That which unites working women with working men is stronger than that which divides them. They are united by their common lack of rights, their common needs, their common condition, which is struggle and their common goal.... Solidarity between working men and working women, common activity, a common goal, a common path to this goal—such is the solution of the 'woman' question among workers."
We look forward to celebrating future International Women's Days not only through the dissemination of propaganda, but also through the initiation of the full range of activities traditionally associated with this proletarian holiday—general strikes, insurrections, revolution!
Wednesday, March 06, 2019
*Honor International Women's Day- A Workers' Holiday
Click on title to link to "A History In Words and Images Of International Women's Day".
This is a repost of a commentary for International Women's Day 2008
COMMENTARY
MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH-MARCH 8TH IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
MARCH 2009 (WESTERN DATES) MARKS THE 92TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA STARTED ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY BY WOMEN TEXTILE WORKERS AND OTHER WOMEN DEMANDING BREAD AND PEACE, AMONG OTHER ISSUES DURING THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR I.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the journal "Women and Revolution" in 1975
"Under the lead of the Third International, the day of the working women shall become a real fighting day; it shall take the form of practical measures which either solidify the conquests of Communism ...or prepare the way for the dictatorship of the working class."
-
Alexandra Kollontai (early Bolshevik leader)
Bourgeois feminists may celebrate it, but March 8 —International Women's Day—is a workers' holiday. Originating in 1908 among the female needle trades workers in Manhattan's Lower East Side, who marched under the slogans "for an eight hour day," "for the end of child labor" and "equal suffrage for women," it was officially adopted by the Second International in 1911.
International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women's oppression and the program for emancipation.
The following year the Bolsheviks not only agitated for International Women's Day in the pages of Pravda (then publishing under the name Put' Pravdy), but also made preparations to publish a special journal dealing with questions of women's liberation in Russia and internationally. It was called Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), and its first issue was scheduled to appear on International Women's Day, 1914.
Preparations for the holiday were made under the most hazardous conditions. Shortly before the long-awaited day the entire editorial board of Rabotnitsa— with one exception—as well as other Bolsheviks who had agitated for International Women's Day in St. Petersburg factories, were arrested by the Tsarist police. Despite these arrests, however, the Bolsheviks pushed ahead with their preparations. Anna Elizarova —Lenin's sister and the one member of the editorial board to escape arrest—single-handedly brought out the first issue of Rabotnitsa on March 8 (or, according to the old Russian calendar, February 23) as scheduled. Clara Zetkin, a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and in the international working women's movement, wrote:
"Greetings to you on your courageous decision to organize Women's Day, congratulations to you for not losing courage and not wanting to sit by with your hands folded. We are with you, heart and soul. You and your movement will be remembered at numerous meetings organized for Women's Day in Germany, Austria, Hungary and America."
—Quoted in A. Artiukhina, "Proidennyi Put',"
Zhenshehina v revoliutsii
By far the most important celebration ever of International Women's Day took place in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers of that city led a strike of over 90,000 workers—a strike which signaled the end of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. One week afterward, Pravda commented:
"The first day of the revolution—that is the Women's Day, the day of the Women Workers' International. All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on their day."
As the position of Soviet women degenerated under Stalin and his successors, as part of the degeneration of the entire Soviet workers state, International Women's Day was transformed from a day of international proletarian solidarity into an empty ritual which, like Mother's Day in the United States, glorifies the traditional role of women within the family.
But International Women's Day is a celebration neither of motherhood nor sisterhood; to ignore this fact is to ignore the most significant aspects of its history and purpose, which was to strengthen the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. Unlike the pre-war Mensheviks who wanted to conciliate the feminists of their day by limiting the celebration of International Women's Day to women only, the Bolsheviks insisted that it be a holiday of working women and working men in struggle together. As Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife and life-long political companion) wrote in the lead article of the first issue of Rabotnitsa:
"That which unites working women with working men is stronger than that which divides them. They are united by their common lack of rights, their common needs, their common condition, which is struggle and their common goal.... Solidarity between working men and working women, common activity, a common goal, a common path to this goal—such is the solution of the 'woman' question among workers."
We look forward to celebrating future International Women's Days not only through the dissemination of propaganda, but also through the initiation of the full range of activities traditionally associated with this proletarian holiday—general strikes, insurrections, revolution!
This is a repost of a commentary for International Women's Day 2008
COMMENTARY
MARCH IS WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH-MARCH 8TH IS INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY
MARCH 2009 (WESTERN DATES) MARKS THE 92TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FEBRUARY 1917 REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA STARTED ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY BY WOMEN TEXTILE WORKERS AND OTHER WOMEN DEMANDING BREAD AND PEACE, AMONG OTHER ISSUES DURING THE HEIGHT OF WORLD WAR I.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the journal "Women and Revolution" in 1975
"Under the lead of the Third International, the day of the working women shall become a real fighting day; it shall take the form of practical measures which either solidify the conquests of Communism ...or prepare the way for the dictatorship of the working class."
-
Alexandra Kollontai (early Bolshevik leader)
Bourgeois feminists may celebrate it, but March 8 —International Women's Day—is a workers' holiday. Originating in 1908 among the female needle trades workers in Manhattan's Lower East Side, who marched under the slogans "for an eight hour day," "for the end of child labor" and "equal suffrage for women," it was officially adopted by the Second International in 1911.
International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 where it was widely publicized in the pages of the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda, and popularized by speeches in numerous clubs and societies controlled by Bolshevik organizations which presented a Marxist analysis of women's oppression and the program for emancipation.
The following year the Bolsheviks not only agitated for International Women's Day in the pages of Pravda (then publishing under the name Put' Pravdy), but also made preparations to publish a special journal dealing with questions of women's liberation in Russia and internationally. It was called Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), and its first issue was scheduled to appear on International Women's Day, 1914.
Preparations for the holiday were made under the most hazardous conditions. Shortly before the long-awaited day the entire editorial board of Rabotnitsa— with one exception—as well as other Bolsheviks who had agitated for International Women's Day in St. Petersburg factories, were arrested by the Tsarist police. Despite these arrests, however, the Bolsheviks pushed ahead with their preparations. Anna Elizarova —Lenin's sister and the one member of the editorial board to escape arrest—single-handedly brought out the first issue of Rabotnitsa on March 8 (or, according to the old Russian calendar, February 23) as scheduled. Clara Zetkin, a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and in the international working women's movement, wrote:
"Greetings to you on your courageous decision to organize Women's Day, congratulations to you for not losing courage and not wanting to sit by with your hands folded. We are with you, heart and soul. You and your movement will be remembered at numerous meetings organized for Women's Day in Germany, Austria, Hungary and America."
—Quoted in A. Artiukhina, "Proidennyi Put',"
Zhenshehina v revoliutsii
By far the most important celebration ever of International Women's Day took place in Petrograd on 8 March 1917 when the women textile workers of that city led a strike of over 90,000 workers—a strike which signaled the end of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and the beginning of the Russian Revolution. One week afterward, Pravda commented:
"The first day of the revolution—that is the Women's Day, the day of the Women Workers' International. All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on their day."
As the position of Soviet women degenerated under Stalin and his successors, as part of the degeneration of the entire Soviet workers state, International Women's Day was transformed from a day of international proletarian solidarity into an empty ritual which, like Mother's Day in the United States, glorifies the traditional role of women within the family.
But International Women's Day is a celebration neither of motherhood nor sisterhood; to ignore this fact is to ignore the most significant aspects of its history and purpose, which was to strengthen the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat. Unlike the pre-war Mensheviks who wanted to conciliate the feminists of their day by limiting the celebration of International Women's Day to women only, the Bolsheviks insisted that it be a holiday of working women and working men in struggle together. As Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife and life-long political companion) wrote in the lead article of the first issue of Rabotnitsa:
"That which unites working women with working men is stronger than that which divides them. They are united by their common lack of rights, their common needs, their common condition, which is struggle and their common goal.... Solidarity between working men and working women, common activity, a common goal, a common path to this goal—such is the solution of the 'woman' question among workers."
We look forward to celebrating future International Women's Days not only through the dissemination of propaganda, but also through the initiation of the full range of activities traditionally associated with this proletarian holiday—general strikes, insurrections, revolution!
Saturday, March 02, 2019
*From The Pages Of "Workers Vanguard"-Honor International Women's Day- A Workers' Holiday
Click on the title to link to an on line copy of the "Workers Vanguard" article on the subject mentioned in the headline.
Friday, March 01, 2019
*In Honor Of Women's History Month- Songs Of The American Women's Suffrage Movement
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the histroy of the women's suffrage movement in America as background for this blog entry.
Guest Commentary/Lyrics
March Is Women's History Month
Here are the lyrics to some songs of the women's suffrage movement. The lyrics do not necessarily, and in the case of the first song definitely do not, represent the views of this site but are provided for historical purposes only. They are placed here rather to show the tensions that existed between the goals of the early feminist movement and the socialist movement at the time, a tension that is still very much with us).
Suffrage Songs and Verses
By
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
10 Cents
THE CHARLTON COMPANY
67 Wall Street, New York
1911
Here is one that shows a tension between feminist and socialist thought.
THE SOCIALIST AND THE SUFFRAGIST
Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
"My cause is greater than yours!
You only work for a Special Class,
We work for the gain of the General Mass,
Which every good ensures!"
Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
"You underrate my Cause!
While women remain a Subject Class,
You never can move the General Mass,
With your Economic Laws!"
Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
"You misinterpret facts!
There is no room for doubt or schism
In Economic Determinism–
It governs all our acts!"
Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
"You men will always find
That this old world will never move
More swiftly in its ancient groove
While women stay behind! "
"A lifted world lifts women up,"
The Socialist explained.
"You cannot lift the world at all
While half of it is kept so small,"
The Suffragist maintained.
The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
"Your work is all the same:
Work together or work apart,
Work, each of you, with all your heart–
Just get into the game!"
SONG FOR EQUAL SUFFRAGE
Day of hope and day of glory! After slavery and woe,
Comes the dawn of woman's freedom, and the light shall grow and grow
Until every man and woman equal liberty shall know,
In Freedom marching on!
Woman's right is woman's duty! For our share in life we call!
Our will it is not weakened and our power it is not small.
We are half of every nation! We are mothers of them all!
In Wisdom marching on!
Not for self but larger service has our cry for freedom grown,
There is crime, disease and warfare in a world of men alone,
In the name of love we're rising now to serve and save our own,
As Peace comes marching on!
By every sweet and tender tie around our heartstrings curled,
In the cause of nobler motherhood is woman's flag unfurled,
Till every child shall know the joy and peace of mother's world–
As Love comes marching on!
We will help to make a pruning hook of every outgrown sword,
We will help to knit the nations in continuing accord,
In humanity made perfect is the glory of the Lord,
As His world goes marching on!
THE ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS *
Fashionable women in luxurious homes,
With men to feed them, clothe them, pay their bills,
Bow, doff the hat, and fetch the handkerchief;
Hostess or guest; and always so supplied
With graceful deference and courtesy;
Surrounded by their horses, servants, dogs–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
Successful women who have won their way
Alone, with strength of their unaided arm,
Or helped by friends, or softly climbing up
By the sweet aid of "woman's influence";
Successful any way, and caring naught
For any other woman's unsuccess–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
Religious women of the feebler sort–
Not the religion of a righteous world,
A free, enlightened, upward-reaching world,
But the religion that considers life
As something to back out of !– whose ideal
Is to renounce, submit, and sacrifice.
Counting on being patted on the head
And given a high chair when they get to heaven–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
Ignorant women–college bred sometimes,
But ignorant of life's realities
And principles of righteous government,
And how the privileges they enjoy
Were won with blood and tears by those before–
Those they condemn, whose ways they now oppose;
Saying, "Why not let well enough alone?"
Our world is very pleasant as it is"–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
And selfish women–pigs in petticoats–
Rich, poor, wise, unwise, top or bottom round,
But all sublimely innocent of thought,
And guiltless of ambition, save the one
Deep, voiceless aspiration–to be fed!
These have no use for rights or duties more.
Duties today are more than they can meet,
And law insures their right to clothes and food–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
And, more's the pity, some good women too;
Good, conscientious women with ideas;
Who think–or think they think–that woman's cause
Is best advanced by letting it alone;
That she somehow is not a human thing,
And not to be helped on by human means,
Just added to humanity–an "L"–
A wing, a branch, an extra, not mankind–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
And out of these has come a monstrous thing,
A strange, down-sucking whirlpool of disgrace,
Women uniting against womanhood,
And using that great name to hide their sin!
Vain are their words as that old king's command
Who set his will against the rising tide.
But who shall measure the historic shame
Of these poor traitors–traitors are they all–
To great Democracy and Womanhood!
WOMEN DO NOT WANT IT *
When the woman suffrage argument first stood upon its legs,
They answered it with cabbages, they answered it with eggs,
They answered it with ridicule, they answered it with scorn,
They thought it a monstrosity that should not have been born.
When the woman suffrage argument grew vigorous and wise,
And was not to be answered by these opposite replies,
They turned their opposition into reasoning severe
Upon the limitations of our God-appointed sphere.
We were told of disabilities–a long array of these,
Till one could think that womanhood was merely a disease;
And "the maternal sacrifice" was added to the plan
Of the various sacrifices we have always made–to man.
Religionists and scientists, in amity and bliss,
However else they disagreed, could all agree on this,
And the gist of all their discourse, when you got down in it,
Was–we could not have the ballot because we were not fit!
They would not hear the reason, they would not fairly yield,
They would not own their arguments were beaten in the field;
But time passed on, and someway, we need not ask them how,
Whatever ails those arguments–we do not hear them now!
You may talk of suffrage now with an educated man,
And he agrees with all you say, as sweetly as he can:
'T would be better for us all, of course, if womanhood was free;
But "the women do not want it"–and so it must not be!
IT is such a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!
Not to pile on our frail shoulders what we do not wish to bear!
But, oh, most generous brother! Let us look a little more–
Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?
Did we ask for veils and harems in the Oriental races?
Did we beseech to be "unclean," shut out of sacred places?
Did we beg for scolding bridles and ducking stools to come?
And clamour for the beating stick no thicker than your thumb?
Did we ask to be forbidden from all the trades that pay?
Did we claim the lower wages for a man's full work today?
Have we petitioned for the laws wherein our shame is shown:
That not a woman's child–nor her own body–is her own?
What women want has never been a strongly acting cause,
When woman has been wronged by man in churches, customs, laws;
Why should he find this preference so largely in his way,
When he himself admits the right of what we ask today?
********
Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be? (Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be?) by L. May Wheeler
Set to a popular parlour tune, this song addresses an argument made against woman's suffrage: that women already had everything they needed - male protection, a sphere of their own - and didn't need to vote as well.
Chorus:
Oh Dear, what can the matter be
Dear dear what can the matter be
Oh dear, what can the matter be
Women are wanting to vote
Verses:
Women have husbands, they are protected
Women have sons by whom they're directed
Women have fathers, they're not neglected
Why are they wanting to vote?
Women have homes, there they should labor
Women have children whom they should favor
Women have time to learn of each neighbor
Why are they wanting to vote?
Women can dress, they love society
Women have cash with all its variety
Women can pray with sweetest piety
Why are they wanting to vote?
Women have reared all the sons of the brave
Women have shared n the burdens they gave
Women have labored this country to save
And that's why we're going to vote
Final Chorus:
Oh Dear, what can the matter be
Dear dear what can the matter be
Oh dear, what can the matter be
Why should men get every vote?
Keep Woman in Her Sphere (Auld Lang Syne) by D. Estabrook
This song is found in numerous suffrage songbooks, and was widely sung at rallies.
I have a neighbor, one of those
Not very hard to find
Who know it all without debate
And never change their mind
I asked him"What of woman's rights?"
He said in tones severe--
"My mind on that is all made up,
Keep woman in her sphere."
I saw a man in tattered garb
Forth from the grog-shop come
He squandered all his cash for drink
and starved his wife at home
I asked him "Should not woman vote"
He answered with a sneer--
"I've taught my wife to know her place,
Keep woman in her sphere."
I met an earnest, thoughtful man
Not many days ago
Who pondered deep all human law
The honest truth to know
I asked him"What of woman's cause?"
The answer came sincere --
"Her rights are just the same as mine,
Let woman choose her sphere."
The New America (America)
Sung at the National-American Woman's Suffrage Convention, 1891, this song reflects a common suffrage argument - that giving women the vote simply fullfilled the promise of 1776.
Our country, now from thee,Claim we our liberty, In freedom's name
Guarding home's altar fires, Daughters of patriot sires, Their zeal our own inspires, Justice to claim
Women in every age, For this great heritage, Tribute have paid
Our birth-right claim we now, Longer refuse to bow, On freedom's altar now, Our hand is laid
Sons, will you longer see, Mothers on bended knee, For justice pray?,
Rise now, in manhood's might, With earth's great souls unite, To speed the dawning light, Of freedom's day
Guest Commentary/Lyrics
March Is Women's History Month
Here are the lyrics to some songs of the women's suffrage movement. The lyrics do not necessarily, and in the case of the first song definitely do not, represent the views of this site but are provided for historical purposes only. They are placed here rather to show the tensions that existed between the goals of the early feminist movement and the socialist movement at the time, a tension that is still very much with us).
Suffrage Songs and Verses
By
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
10 Cents
THE CHARLTON COMPANY
67 Wall Street, New York
1911
Here is one that shows a tension between feminist and socialist thought.
THE SOCIALIST AND THE SUFFRAGIST
Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
"My cause is greater than yours!
You only work for a Special Class,
We work for the gain of the General Mass,
Which every good ensures!"
Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
"You underrate my Cause!
While women remain a Subject Class,
You never can move the General Mass,
With your Economic Laws!"
Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
"You misinterpret facts!
There is no room for doubt or schism
In Economic Determinism–
It governs all our acts!"
Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
"You men will always find
That this old world will never move
More swiftly in its ancient groove
While women stay behind! "
"A lifted world lifts women up,"
The Socialist explained.
"You cannot lift the world at all
While half of it is kept so small,"
The Suffragist maintained.
The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
"Your work is all the same:
Work together or work apart,
Work, each of you, with all your heart–
Just get into the game!"
SONG FOR EQUAL SUFFRAGE
Day of hope and day of glory! After slavery and woe,
Comes the dawn of woman's freedom, and the light shall grow and grow
Until every man and woman equal liberty shall know,
In Freedom marching on!
Woman's right is woman's duty! For our share in life we call!
Our will it is not weakened and our power it is not small.
We are half of every nation! We are mothers of them all!
In Wisdom marching on!
Not for self but larger service has our cry for freedom grown,
There is crime, disease and warfare in a world of men alone,
In the name of love we're rising now to serve and save our own,
As Peace comes marching on!
By every sweet and tender tie around our heartstrings curled,
In the cause of nobler motherhood is woman's flag unfurled,
Till every child shall know the joy and peace of mother's world–
As Love comes marching on!
We will help to make a pruning hook of every outgrown sword,
We will help to knit the nations in continuing accord,
In humanity made perfect is the glory of the Lord,
As His world goes marching on!
THE ANTI-SUFFRAGISTS *
Fashionable women in luxurious homes,
With men to feed them, clothe them, pay their bills,
Bow, doff the hat, and fetch the handkerchief;
Hostess or guest; and always so supplied
With graceful deference and courtesy;
Surrounded by their horses, servants, dogs–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
Successful women who have won their way
Alone, with strength of their unaided arm,
Or helped by friends, or softly climbing up
By the sweet aid of "woman's influence";
Successful any way, and caring naught
For any other woman's unsuccess–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
Religious women of the feebler sort–
Not the religion of a righteous world,
A free, enlightened, upward-reaching world,
But the religion that considers life
As something to back out of !– whose ideal
Is to renounce, submit, and sacrifice.
Counting on being patted on the head
And given a high chair when they get to heaven–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
Ignorant women–college bred sometimes,
But ignorant of life's realities
And principles of righteous government,
And how the privileges they enjoy
Were won with blood and tears by those before–
Those they condemn, whose ways they now oppose;
Saying, "Why not let well enough alone?"
Our world is very pleasant as it is"–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
And selfish women–pigs in petticoats–
Rich, poor, wise, unwise, top or bottom round,
But all sublimely innocent of thought,
And guiltless of ambition, save the one
Deep, voiceless aspiration–to be fed!
These have no use for rights or duties more.
Duties today are more than they can meet,
And law insures their right to clothes and food–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
And, more's the pity, some good women too;
Good, conscientious women with ideas;
Who think–or think they think–that woman's cause
Is best advanced by letting it alone;
That she somehow is not a human thing,
And not to be helped on by human means,
Just added to humanity–an "L"–
A wing, a branch, an extra, not mankind–
These tell us they have all the rights they want.
And out of these has come a monstrous thing,
A strange, down-sucking whirlpool of disgrace,
Women uniting against womanhood,
And using that great name to hide their sin!
Vain are their words as that old king's command
Who set his will against the rising tide.
But who shall measure the historic shame
Of these poor traitors–traitors are they all–
To great Democracy and Womanhood!
WOMEN DO NOT WANT IT *
When the woman suffrage argument first stood upon its legs,
They answered it with cabbages, they answered it with eggs,
They answered it with ridicule, they answered it with scorn,
They thought it a monstrosity that should not have been born.
When the woman suffrage argument grew vigorous and wise,
And was not to be answered by these opposite replies,
They turned their opposition into reasoning severe
Upon the limitations of our God-appointed sphere.
We were told of disabilities–a long array of these,
Till one could think that womanhood was merely a disease;
And "the maternal sacrifice" was added to the plan
Of the various sacrifices we have always made–to man.
Religionists and scientists, in amity and bliss,
However else they disagreed, could all agree on this,
And the gist of all their discourse, when you got down in it,
Was–we could not have the ballot because we were not fit!
They would not hear the reason, they would not fairly yield,
They would not own their arguments were beaten in the field;
But time passed on, and someway, we need not ask them how,
Whatever ails those arguments–we do not hear them now!
You may talk of suffrage now with an educated man,
And he agrees with all you say, as sweetly as he can:
'T would be better for us all, of course, if womanhood was free;
But "the women do not want it"–and so it must not be!
IT is such a tender thoughtfulness! So exquisite a care!
Not to pile on our frail shoulders what we do not wish to bear!
But, oh, most generous brother! Let us look a little more–
Have we women always wanted what you gave to us before?
Did we ask for veils and harems in the Oriental races?
Did we beseech to be "unclean," shut out of sacred places?
Did we beg for scolding bridles and ducking stools to come?
And clamour for the beating stick no thicker than your thumb?
Did we ask to be forbidden from all the trades that pay?
Did we claim the lower wages for a man's full work today?
Have we petitioned for the laws wherein our shame is shown:
That not a woman's child–nor her own body–is her own?
What women want has never been a strongly acting cause,
When woman has been wronged by man in churches, customs, laws;
Why should he find this preference so largely in his way,
When he himself admits the right of what we ask today?
********
Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be? (Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be?) by L. May Wheeler
Set to a popular parlour tune, this song addresses an argument made against woman's suffrage: that women already had everything they needed - male protection, a sphere of their own - and didn't need to vote as well.
Chorus:
Oh Dear, what can the matter be
Dear dear what can the matter be
Oh dear, what can the matter be
Women are wanting to vote
Verses:
Women have husbands, they are protected
Women have sons by whom they're directed
Women have fathers, they're not neglected
Why are they wanting to vote?
Women have homes, there they should labor
Women have children whom they should favor
Women have time to learn of each neighbor
Why are they wanting to vote?
Women can dress, they love society
Women have cash with all its variety
Women can pray with sweetest piety
Why are they wanting to vote?
Women have reared all the sons of the brave
Women have shared n the burdens they gave
Women have labored this country to save
And that's why we're going to vote
Final Chorus:
Oh Dear, what can the matter be
Dear dear what can the matter be
Oh dear, what can the matter be
Why should men get every vote?
Keep Woman in Her Sphere (Auld Lang Syne) by D. Estabrook
This song is found in numerous suffrage songbooks, and was widely sung at rallies.
I have a neighbor, one of those
Not very hard to find
Who know it all without debate
And never change their mind
I asked him"What of woman's rights?"
He said in tones severe--
"My mind on that is all made up,
Keep woman in her sphere."
I saw a man in tattered garb
Forth from the grog-shop come
He squandered all his cash for drink
and starved his wife at home
I asked him "Should not woman vote"
He answered with a sneer--
"I've taught my wife to know her place,
Keep woman in her sphere."
I met an earnest, thoughtful man
Not many days ago
Who pondered deep all human law
The honest truth to know
I asked him"What of woman's cause?"
The answer came sincere --
"Her rights are just the same as mine,
Let woman choose her sphere."
The New America (America)
Sung at the National-American Woman's Suffrage Convention, 1891, this song reflects a common suffrage argument - that giving women the vote simply fullfilled the promise of 1776.
Our country, now from thee,Claim we our liberty, In freedom's name
Guarding home's altar fires, Daughters of patriot sires, Their zeal our own inspires, Justice to claim
Women in every age, For this great heritage, Tribute have paid
Our birth-right claim we now, Longer refuse to bow, On freedom's altar now, Our hand is laid
Sons, will you longer see, Mothers on bended knee, For justice pray?,
Rise now, in manhood's might, With earth's great souls unite, To speed the dawning light, Of freedom's day
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
When The Whole World Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor Of The Commemoration of 100th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth-A Different Look At The Women Question -On Jumping Through Hoops- Rita Hayworth’s Gilda- A Film Review
When The Whole World
Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor
Of The Commemoration of 100th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth-A Different Look At The Women Question -On Jumping Through Hoops- Rita Hayworth’s Gilda- A Film Review
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Rita Hayworth. You are forewarned.
DVD Review
Gilda, Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready, Columbia Pictures, 1946
No, this will not be a paean to the virtues of the modern women’s movement and to the women liberation struggle that I have spilled much worthwhile ink arguing for in this space. Let’s place it more as an off-the-cuff social commentary on bourgeois society and the sometimes obscure way that its values get transmitted even to those who oppose, and oppose vehemently, its existence although they are not inured to the pull of some of its (historical progressive) charms. But enough of introductory justification, let us get to the heart of the matter- a film review of 1940s “hot” (you can see where I am going with this already) film star Rita Hayworth in her most famous film, the film noir classic, Gilda, and the men, the legions of men in the film and in the audience, including this writer, whom she had (or, in my case, could have had) jumping through hoops (and much more, gladly).
Now the last time that devilishly sweet-smiling, buttery-voiced, long-legged, big-haired(heck, that's the best I can do, I don't know what they called that style but other "hot" 1940s women stars like Lauren Bacall and Veronica Lake wore it that way too), been around the block and is still standing, femme fatale, relentlessly sexual, very relentlessly sexual, Rita’s name came up for this writer was when her photograph, just her big blow-up photo nothing more, was used to cover (literally) actor Tim Robbins’ escape route in the film, The Shawshank Redemption. Of course, that flash got me to thinking about the film Gilda and there you have it. So naturally I had to see the thing, again. I have had to wait until now though to write this little commentary until my doctor said that my blood pressure had gone down enough to do so.
Here are the high points of the plot quickly. Down and out American expatriate fellaheen, Johnny Farrow (played by Glenn Ford), finds himself in Buenos Aires doing, well, doing the best he can. Sometimes though doing the best one can, when down and out at the lumpen edges of society is risky, very risky, and not just in Buenos Aires, as the French writers Genet and Celine can tell you. Up steps “savior” Ballin, illegal night club owner, power-monger and all-around megalomaniac (played by icy George Macready) to offer job, companionship and advice. Most importantly, on the advice front, that gambling and women don’t mix, especially for up-and-coming managerial prospects. Naturally, that advice goes by the boards when femme fatale Gilda (off film) marries one totally enchanted megalomaniac Ballin. That’s one hoopster corralled. Turns out though that Johnny and Gilda know each other and had previously held the "torch" for each other. Well, to make the story short, the rest of the “boy meets girl” action is spent with old Johnny denying on three (maybe more) bibles that he is over, done with, finished with, couldn’t care less about, is not smitten with, Gilda. Maybe. Ya, there goes another hoopster down.
As we know, which was very routine for 1940s (and now, for that matter, see Avatar) “boy meets girl” films in the end things will work out, although it was close for a while here. Ballin, despite his off-hand desire to rule the world, was so smitten with Gilda that he could not think straight. Johnny was so smitten with Gilda that he could not think straight. The 1940s male audience was so smitten with Gilda that they could not think straight. The modern male audience is so smitten with Gilda that it cannot think straight (oops). And it is just not me, old as I am. I showed a picture of Rita Hayworth to some young leftist male college students once, and they were drooling just like I was. So there are the rest of your hoopsters.
Now where does all this lead. Simply this, or maybe not so simply, in the course of human relationships there are people (there are many permutations) you will jump through hoops for and for no known reason (dare I say rational reason?). I have done it more times than I care to admit, and gladly. That is what makes the millions of possible relationships that humankind has run through so interesting, even within the limitations of bourgeois society. Well, I have to finish this thing up. And here is how. Leon Trotsky, the great Russian Bolshevik revolutionary leader, according to his best biographer Isaac Deutscher, once stated that of the three great tragedies of human existence, hunger, sex, and death that revolutionaries had, necessarily, to concentrate on the struggle against hunger but that under a more equitable socialist society the other two would be dealt with in a much better manner. Let us hope so. Meanwhile we hoopsters have our Gildas. And that is just fine. Oh, did I mention that among Rita’s other charms that she could sing (well, lip-sync, being able to sing is overrated anyway, don't you think? ), dance, and strum a guitar. Wait, I have to stop now I feel that old blood pressure rising again.
Monday, August 13, 2018
When The Whole World Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor Of The Commemoration of 100th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth- A Different Look At The Women Question –Once Again, On Jumping Through Hoops- Rita Hayworth’s “The Lady From Shanghai”- Hey, She Ain’t No Lady
When The Whole World
Reached Out For One Sweet Breathe Of Hollywood Glamour When It Counted-In Honor
Of The Commemoration of 100th Birthday Of Rita Hayworth- A Different Look At The Women Question –Once Again, On Jumping Through Hoops- Rita Hayworth’s “The Lady From Shanghai”- Hey, She Ain’t No Lady
Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for The Lady From Shanghai.
DVD Review
The Lady From Shanghai, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Columbia Pictures, 1948
Recently I reviewed Rita Hayworth’s classic femme fatale performance in Gilda in this space after some delay from the time of watching, on doctor’s advice, until such time as my blood pressure when down enough to safety do the film justice. At the end of that review I nevertheless had to cut it short because I could definitely feel that old pressure rising again. But I am okay now and can review a later Hayworth femme fatale effort, The Lady From Shanghia. Old Rita still has them (and me) jumping through hoops but I am not worrying about my blood pressure on this one.
Let me repeat some of that previous Gilda review to make sure that we are all on the same page here:
“….But enough of introductory justification, let us get to the heart of the matter- a film review of 1940s “hot” (you can see where I am going with this already) film star Rita Hayworth in her most famous film, the film noir classic, Gilda, and the men, the legions of men in the film and in the audience, including this writer, whom she had (or could have had in my case) jumping through hoops (and much more).
Now the last time that devilishly sweet-smiling, buttery-voiced, long-legged, big-haired, been around the block and is still standing, femme fatale Rita’s name came up for this writer was when her photograph, just her big blow-up photo nothing more, was used to cover (literally) actor Tim Robbins’ escape route in the film, The Shawshank Redemption. Of course, that flash got me to thinking about the film Gilda and there you have it. So naturally I had to see the thing, again. I have had to wait until now though to write this little commentary until my doctor said that I my blood pressure went down a little.”
And seeing Gilda of course let to this review. Know that the points made in the quoted commentary still stands here, except that she, Rita that is, is a blonde femme fatale this time. And know not all femme fatales are born equal. Some like Gilda are capable of good and some like the lady from Shanghai here are not.
Here are the high points of the plot quickly. Down and out seaman “Black Irish” O’ Hara (Orson Welles) hits New York looking for… something. And he finds it without much trouble, although in the end it will be nothing but trouble. Enter Elsa (Rita Hayworth) who just happens to be slumming on a horse and buggy ride in Central Park and who, as fate would have it, a not uncommon fate at least in Central Park, is waylaid by some hooligans. Black Irish comes to the rescue and is immediately smitten. Black Irish, please, please she is poison, even I can tell that. But, no, old Blackie is bound and determined to pursue this deadly course, also a not uncommon occurrence when one is smitten.
Of course problem number one is that said Elsa is married, married to a great criminal lawyer, Arthur Bannister (played by Everett Sloane) with some serious physical disabilities and a perverse mental make-up that has old Elsa fed up. Problem number two is that Elsa and said hubby are going on a long sea voyage via the Panama Canal to their home port ‘Frisco on their yacht. Hey, Blackie, you’re a sailor why don’t you come along as a crew member. Okay Blackie, second chance, please, please don’t do it. Damn, he signs on. From there you know he is a goner.
Why? Well, up front old Arthur has a partner, Grisby, who is also under Elsa’s spell, at least enough to try to assist her in getting rid of the old goat by any means necessary. I don’t have to draw you a diagram on that proposition. The rest of the plot centers on making Blackie the fall guy for the murder of old Arthur. But as such things do, the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry. Old Grisby winds up dead, Blackie winds up framed for murder and, naturally, Arthur feels duty-bound to defend him. Of course such a defense has a double-edge as Blackie will soon enough find out. And will find out soon enough as well that not all femme fatales are on the level when the heat is turned up. Love will only take you so far though, and then justice, rough justice anyway has to come into play. Still, if you ask Blackie in the sober light of day whether he would do it again, hell, you know the answer. Black Irish is just another of old Rita’s hoopsters. Stand in line brother.
Okay, now for the finale. How does this film, this great director Orson Welles’ film, compare with Gilda? Well…let’s say I’m partial to redheads, if I have a choice. And I am partial to “good” femme fatales with a little heart, as well. Especially if they can dance, strum a guitar, sing (okay, lip synch) and give that look (you know that look, right?) like old Rita did in Gilda. But, I am a man of the ocean so maybe, just maybe, I would sign on for that cruise. Hey, I never said I wasn’t just another Rita hoopster. But this time my blood pressure is okay at the end.
Monday, October 23, 2017
On Being "Red" Emma- A Book Review On The Life And Times Of Emma Goldman-"EMMA GOLDMAN: Revolution as a Way of Life" By Vivian Gornick
On Being "Red" Emma- A Book Review On The Life And Times Of Emma Goldman-"EMMA GOLDMAN: Revolution as a Way of Life" By Vivian Gornick
Markin comment:
Below is the re-post of a review that I did earlier in this space on a documentary on Emma Goldman.
******
Thursday, March 20, 2008
"Red" Emma Goldman-The Fate of An Anarchist Woman
DVD REVIEW
MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
EMMA GOLDMAN: AN EXCEEDINGLY DANGEROUS WOMAN, PBS, 2004
Fair portions of the comments made in the following review were also made in a review of Emma Goldman's autobiography Living My Life for Women’s History Month in March 2007. This PBS documentary tracks a great deal of the chronology of events and Ms. Goldman’s reflections on her life made in that book. Needless to say, as is almost always the case with PBS documentaries the filming and editing are top notch even if the politics are fuzzy and reek of do-goodism. As always, as well, with theses types of documentaries you get a plethora of 'talking heads' giving their take on the life of this exceedingly interesting and controversial woman, some expressed quite passionately by comparison with other documentary efforts. Read on.
Sometimes in reviewing a political biography or autobiography of some capitalist hanger-on such as George Bush, Tony Blair or Jacques Chirac it is simply a matter of dismissing a known and deadly political opponent and so heaping scorn up that person is part of the territory of being a leftist militant. For others who allegedly stand in the socialist tradition, like the old theoretical leader of the pre-World War I German social democracy Karl Kautsky, who provide reformist rather than revolutionary solutions to the pressing issues of the day that also tends to be true, as well.
However, with an enigmatic figure like the anarcho-communist and modern day feminist heroine "Red" Emma Goldman it is harder to do the political savaging job that is necessary. Why? Ms. Goldman came out of that tradition of pre-World War I life-style anarchism (made fashionable in the Greenwich Village of the time) where her politics, to the extent that political carping is politics, placed her somewhere on this side of the angels. However, the total effect of her career as an anarchist propagandist, sometime agitator and proponent of women’s rights shows very little as a present day contribution to radical history. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) experiences (recently reviewed here), by comparison, are filled with lessons for today’s militants.
Obviously someone associated with the fiery German immigrant anarchist Johann Most is by any measure going to have trouble with some government at some point in their lives. Most was Goldman's lover and first teacher of the principles of ' propaganda by the deed' anarchism. For those readers not familiar with that tendency the core of the politics is that exemplary actions, not excluding martyrdom, by individual heroic revolutionaries are supposed to act as the catalyst to move the masses. In short, these are the politics of ‘shoot first and ask questions later’. As a tactic within a revolutionary period it may prove necessary and make some sense but as a strategy to put masses in motion, no empathically, no.
Emma's own life provides the case study for the negative aspects of this theory. At the time of the famous bloody Homestead Steel strike in the 1890's here in America Ms. Goldman's lifelong companion and fellow anarchist of the deed, Alexander Berkman, decided that the assassination of one Henry Frick, bloody symbol of capitalist greed in the strike, would serve in order to intensify the struggle of capital against labor. Needless to say, although Mr. Berkman was successful, in part, in his attempt both Mr. Frick and the Homestead plant were back in business forthwith. For his pains Berkman received a long jail sentence.
The most troubling aspect of Ms. Goldman's career for this writer is her relationship to the Bolshevik Revolution. Let us be clear, as readers of this space know, I have not tried to hide the problems generated by that revolution from which, given the course of history in the 20th century, the Soviet Union was never able to recover. However, from Ms. Goldman's descriptions of the problems seen in her short, very short stay in the Soviet Union just after the revolutionary takeover one would have to assume that, like most aspects of her life, this was just one more issue to walk away from because she personally did not like it. She, moreover, became a life-long opponent of that revolution.
In contrast, some pre-World War I anarchists, particularly from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) were able to see the historic importance of the creation of the Soviet state and were drawn to the Communist International. Others, like Emma, used that flawed experiment as a reason to, in essence, reconcile themselves to the bourgeois order. Nowhere is that position, and that tension, more blatantly spelled out that in Spain in 1936.
Spain, 1936 was the political dividing point for all kinds of political tendencies, right and left. While we will allow the rightists to stew in their own juices the various positions on the left in the cauldron of revolution graphically illustrate the roadblocks to revolution that allowed fascism, Spanish style, to gain an undeserved military victory and ruin the political perspectives of at least two generations of Spanish militants. The classic anarchist position, adhered to by Ms. Goldman, is to deny the centrality of conquering and transformation of the capitalist state power (and the old ruling governmental, social, cultural and economic apparatuses). To the anarchist this necessity is somehow to be morphed away by who knows what.
Yes, that is the theory but on the hard ground of Spain that was not the reality as the main anarchist federation FAI/CNT gave political support to the bourgeois republican government and accepted seats in that government. These same elements went on to play a part in disarming the 1937 Barcelona uprising that could have sparked a new revolutionary outburst by the disheartened workers and peasants. So much for anarchist practice in the clutch. Ms. Goldman spent no little ink defending the actions of her comrades in Spain. Wrong on Russia and Spain, on the side of the angels on women's issues and the need to fight capitalism. In short, all over the political map on strategic issues. Still, although Emma was, and her defenders today are, political opponents this writer does not relish that fact. Damn it.
Markin comment:
Below is the re-post of a review that I did earlier in this space on a documentary on Emma Goldman.
******
Thursday, March 20, 2008
"Red" Emma Goldman-The Fate of An Anarchist Woman
DVD REVIEW
MARCH IS WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH
EMMA GOLDMAN: AN EXCEEDINGLY DANGEROUS WOMAN, PBS, 2004
Fair portions of the comments made in the following review were also made in a review of Emma Goldman's autobiography Living My Life for Women’s History Month in March 2007. This PBS documentary tracks a great deal of the chronology of events and Ms. Goldman’s reflections on her life made in that book. Needless to say, as is almost always the case with PBS documentaries the filming and editing are top notch even if the politics are fuzzy and reek of do-goodism. As always, as well, with theses types of documentaries you get a plethora of 'talking heads' giving their take on the life of this exceedingly interesting and controversial woman, some expressed quite passionately by comparison with other documentary efforts. Read on.
Sometimes in reviewing a political biography or autobiography of some capitalist hanger-on such as George Bush, Tony Blair or Jacques Chirac it is simply a matter of dismissing a known and deadly political opponent and so heaping scorn up that person is part of the territory of being a leftist militant. For others who allegedly stand in the socialist tradition, like the old theoretical leader of the pre-World War I German social democracy Karl Kautsky, who provide reformist rather than revolutionary solutions to the pressing issues of the day that also tends to be true, as well.
However, with an enigmatic figure like the anarcho-communist and modern day feminist heroine "Red" Emma Goldman it is harder to do the political savaging job that is necessary. Why? Ms. Goldman came out of that tradition of pre-World War I life-style anarchism (made fashionable in the Greenwich Village of the time) where her politics, to the extent that political carping is politics, placed her somewhere on this side of the angels. However, the total effect of her career as an anarchist propagandist, sometime agitator and proponent of women’s rights shows very little as a present day contribution to radical history. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) experiences (recently reviewed here), by comparison, are filled with lessons for today’s militants.
Obviously someone associated with the fiery German immigrant anarchist Johann Most is by any measure going to have trouble with some government at some point in their lives. Most was Goldman's lover and first teacher of the principles of ' propaganda by the deed' anarchism. For those readers not familiar with that tendency the core of the politics is that exemplary actions, not excluding martyrdom, by individual heroic revolutionaries are supposed to act as the catalyst to move the masses. In short, these are the politics of ‘shoot first and ask questions later’. As a tactic within a revolutionary period it may prove necessary and make some sense but as a strategy to put masses in motion, no empathically, no.
Emma's own life provides the case study for the negative aspects of this theory. At the time of the famous bloody Homestead Steel strike in the 1890's here in America Ms. Goldman's lifelong companion and fellow anarchist of the deed, Alexander Berkman, decided that the assassination of one Henry Frick, bloody symbol of capitalist greed in the strike, would serve in order to intensify the struggle of capital against labor. Needless to say, although Mr. Berkman was successful, in part, in his attempt both Mr. Frick and the Homestead plant were back in business forthwith. For his pains Berkman received a long jail sentence.
The most troubling aspect of Ms. Goldman's career for this writer is her relationship to the Bolshevik Revolution. Let us be clear, as readers of this space know, I have not tried to hide the problems generated by that revolution from which, given the course of history in the 20th century, the Soviet Union was never able to recover. However, from Ms. Goldman's descriptions of the problems seen in her short, very short stay in the Soviet Union just after the revolutionary takeover one would have to assume that, like most aspects of her life, this was just one more issue to walk away from because she personally did not like it. She, moreover, became a life-long opponent of that revolution.
In contrast, some pre-World War I anarchists, particularly from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) were able to see the historic importance of the creation of the Soviet state and were drawn to the Communist International. Others, like Emma, used that flawed experiment as a reason to, in essence, reconcile themselves to the bourgeois order. Nowhere is that position, and that tension, more blatantly spelled out that in Spain in 1936.
Spain, 1936 was the political dividing point for all kinds of political tendencies, right and left. While we will allow the rightists to stew in their own juices the various positions on the left in the cauldron of revolution graphically illustrate the roadblocks to revolution that allowed fascism, Spanish style, to gain an undeserved military victory and ruin the political perspectives of at least two generations of Spanish militants. The classic anarchist position, adhered to by Ms. Goldman, is to deny the centrality of conquering and transformation of the capitalist state power (and the old ruling governmental, social, cultural and economic apparatuses). To the anarchist this necessity is somehow to be morphed away by who knows what.
Yes, that is the theory but on the hard ground of Spain that was not the reality as the main anarchist federation FAI/CNT gave political support to the bourgeois republican government and accepted seats in that government. These same elements went on to play a part in disarming the 1937 Barcelona uprising that could have sparked a new revolutionary outburst by the disheartened workers and peasants. So much for anarchist practice in the clutch. Ms. Goldman spent no little ink defending the actions of her comrades in Spain. Wrong on Russia and Spain, on the side of the angels on women's issues and the need to fight capitalism. In short, all over the political map on strategic issues. Still, although Emma was, and her defenders today are, political opponents this writer does not relish that fact. Damn it.
Sunday, September 03, 2017
*Labor's Untold Story In Song- Remember The Heroic Lawrence Textile Strike Of 1912-"Bread And Roses"-Yes, Indeed
A YouTube's film clip of Joan Baez and her late sister Mimi Farina performing "Bread and Roses" about the famous textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912.
Poem and Song lyrics-"Bread And Roses"
Poem
As we come marching, marching in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: "Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"
As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for -- but we fight for roses, too!
As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days.
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler -- ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses! Song Lyrics
Song
As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!
As we go marching, marching, we battle too for men,
For they are women's children, and we mother them again.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.
As we go marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses too.
As we go marching, marching, we bring the greater days,
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses, bread and roses.
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes;
Hearts starve as well as bodies; bread and roses, bread and roses
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