Saturday, October 24, 2015

From The Archives Of Women And Revolution-In Memory Of Rosa Luxemburg

From The Archives Of  Women And Revolution


Markin comment:

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

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



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

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

Workers Vanguard No. 1068
 

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

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

Friday, October 23, 2015

International Women's Conference

 
 
 
Invest logo.gif
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S CONFERENCEAll Welcome
 
 
 
Dear friends,
 
Here is the leaflet for the conference with a partial list of confirmed speakers. We will update that list as confirmations come in and send a link so you can book in advance. Please circulate this mailing as widely as possible on email, facebook, twitter…
 
The presence of women and men from an increasing number of countries and in different situations broadens the implications of everything we’ll discuss. It ensures that caring will be defined in a deeper way, spelling out all that carers accomplish and the lives they live. We will define caring, not only as the industry which aims to profit from our needs, but as the perspective of a movement which is demanding that the market be at the service of people rather than people at the service of the market.
 
We will be able to compare our campaigning: what we campaign for and against, and what we have learnt about the best way to build our networks and organisations. We will discuss this moment in time – the political forces, the new technologies, the power relations between the classes and among sectors of people. We will discuss what we want to do together and as individual organisations in different parts of the world, and how to strengthen our collective way of working while maintaining our autonomy.
 
In the days following the conference we plan to hold meetings on particular countries and/or issues. We hope that by the end, we will all be in a better position to join with others in opposing the forces of repression and exploitation that are ranged against carers and those we care for.
 
The justice movement in industrial and non-industrial countries, among native people, indigenous people, refugee people, employed and unemployed, waged, partially waged and unwaged, is growing every day. This is our time.
 
Invest in caring not killing.
 
Sara Callaway, Nina Lopez and Benoit Martin
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

*Unfinished Business Of The Black Liberation Struggle-In Honor Of Emmett Till

Reopening The Emmett Till Case-The Case That Has Not Died, Nor Should It*Unfinished Business Of The Black Liberation Struggle-In Honor Of Emmett Till


Reopening The Emmett Till Case-The Case That Has Not Died, Nor Should It

A link to an On Point NPR program on the re-opening of the Emmett Till case.



 www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/07/17/emmett-till-timothy-tyson  



By Frank Jackman



I have, as witnessed below, at various times reviewed some aspect of the Emmett Till case as a matter of historical importance although not to me individually directly since Emmett’s death, murder, happened when I was too young to realize what was going on. I picked up on the civil rights movement for black rights in the Mister James Crow South (and as it turned, turns out the North too) in the early 1960s when I went to downtown Boston and walked a picket line at Woolworth’s in support of the lunch counter demonstrators down South who wanted to have a freaking grilled cheese sandwich without having to face a civil war about it. That is when I first heard about the case, and it has never been far from the surface since.           

Now the Department of Justice, Alabama’s Jeff Session’s DOJ, has reopened the Emmett Till case that his family and partisans have tried to have reopened for many years. The DOJ motivation I am not quite sure of. What I know is that in this case justice will never be done, closure will probably never come but only a better idea of what really happened down in Mister James Crow Mississippi in the 1950s. Still some cases, and Emmett’s is one of them, will never die, nor should they.  





HONOR THE MEMORY OF EMMETT TILL

The following is an appreciation of the life the martyred civil rights figure Emmett Till. It was originally printed in Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League of the United States and reprinted in their Black History series. The beginnings of my personal awareness of the central role of the black liberation struggle in any fight for fundamental change did not stem from the Till tragedy but rather a little latter from the attempts to integrate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. The main political point of the article- the centrality of the black liberation struggle to the overall revolutionary struggle against American imperialism and for a socialist solution to the problems of modern society is also my own position on that question. Although the particular case of what happened to Emmett Till may be resolved before that solution occurs it will take such black liberation in order to do proper justice to his name.



Workers Vanguard No. 852 5 August 2005

The Lynching of Emmett Till and the Fight for Black Liberation
50 Years Later

"Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears.... I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought."
—Anne Moody, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Organizer, 14 years old in 1955, in Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)

Fifty years ago this month the name Emmett Eouis Till became synonymous with the brutal American tradition of lynching. Till was only 14 years old that summer when he left his home in Chicago to join his cousin on a trip to stay with relatives in Mississippi. Within days of his arrival, young Emmett was kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Till's gruesome murder, and his mother's courageous campaign to ensure that the world saw at first hand the stark reality of race-terror by displaying her son's mutilated body at his funeral, provoked horror and outrage against racist oppression in America. The lynching of Emmett Till, along with Rosa Parks' defiant stand in Montgomery, Alabama in December of that same year, were key in galvanizing many thousands to join the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Today, a half-century later, black people still sit in the cross hairs of this bloody capitalist ruling class. The explosive struggles of the civil rights movement smashed Jim Crow segregation in the South and broke the back of the anti-Communist McCarthy era. But the social reality remains—black oppression is the cornerstone of capitalist class rule in America. Contrary to assertions that the worst abuses against black people are a thing of the past, a quick survey of the massive prison population, unemployment, miserable ghetto conditions, poverty, deteriorating health care and increasingly segregated schools proves the opposite, not only in the South but throughout the country.

The current federal investigation of the Emmett Till atrocity is one of a handful of decades-old cases reopened beginning with the 1994 conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers. One reason these cases are being opened is to polish the tarnished image of the South. But union-busting "right to work" laws, attacks on black voting rights, Ku Klux Klan terror like the cross-burnings in Durham, North Carolina this May along with Confederate flags, monuments and Dixie anthems still mark the landscape of the "New South." Meanwhile, Northern ghettos trap black people into holding pens, and kill-crazy cops stalk the streets.

Bush's Republican regime pushes ahead to wipe out the remaining gains of the civil rights movement that had been under attack by Democratic as well as Republican administrations for the last three decades. On the heels of the government launching a vindictive IRS tax investigation of the NAACP, the chairman of the Republican National Committee cynically professed at the NAACP's convention in July, which Bush refused to attend, that the Republican Party's decades-long campaign of courting the racist Southern vote away from the Democrats by opposing civil rights legislation, the "Southern Strategy," was "wrong."

The re-opening of Till's case was largely sparked by the determined nine-year effort of a young filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp, and his 2002 documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. The Feds recently exhumed Till's body to seek forensic evidence, additionally claiming it is necessary to verify that it was indeed Till in the grave. The only people who ever cast doubt on this question were the defenders of the lynchers. For America's capitalist rulers, such re-investigations are nothing more than hypocritical attempts to foster the illusion that today's FBI and Department of Justice are different from the very same state institutions that worked hand in hand with the Klan in the South. By the mid 1960s, nearly 20 percent of Klan members were FBI "informants" serving as loyal double agents of both organizations. Even when the Senate passed a meaningless resolution this June apologizing for never passing anti-lynching legislation, several senators, including the two from Mississippi, refused to sponsor the bill.

Capitalism is a system based on exploitation of labor, and, in the U.S., a unique and critical mainstay continues to be the subjugation of the black population at the bottom of society. American Trotskyist Richard Fraser wrote in the same year that Emmett Till was murdered: "The dual nature of the Negro struggle arises from the fact that a whole people regardless of class distinction are the victims of discrimination. This problem of a whole people can be solved only through the proletarian revolution, under the leadership of the working class" ("For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Struggle," January 1955). We of the Spartacist League base our program for black liberation upon Eraser's perspective of revolutionary integrationism, premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. One of our founding documents written at the time of the ghetto upheavals of the 1960s states:

"The Negro people arc an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. Because of the generations of exceptional oppression, degradation and humiliation, Black people as a group have special needs and problems necessitating additional and special forms of struggle. It is this part of the struggle which has begun today, and from which the most active and militant sections of Black people will gain a deep education and experience in the lessons of struggle. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution."
—"Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," 1967, Marxist Bulletin No. 9

The Lynching of Emmett Till
By all accounts Emmett Till was an amazing kid. He was bright, fun-loving and considerate. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (earlier known as Mamie Till Bradley), and her family had migrated from Mississippi along with hundreds of thousands of other black farmers and sharecroppers fleeing the Jim Crow South in hopes of finding a better life in the "Promised Land" known as Chicago. She knew firsthand the strict social and racial codes of the South that literally spelled life or death if not followed to the letter. So, when she reluctantly allowed Emmett to accompany his cousin Wheeler to Mississippi, she did her best to instill some sense of the dangers and she recounted that she held "the talk that every black parent had with every child sent down South back then" (Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America by Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, 2003).

By the summer of 1955, white racists in Mississippi were seething in bitterness in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which opened the door for integrating schools, albeit hedged with limitations and the reservation of "deliberate speed." The Supreme Court decision to allow school integration was a reflection of a growing movement for black civil rights, for the right to vote and for integration. Black men fought on the front lines in World War II, a war proclaimed to make the world "safe for democracy." Black women migrated to the cities to toil in defense plants. When the soldiers returned, they were determined to have a better life. The end of the war ushered in the beginning of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the preparation for new imperialist wars to "roll back Communism" everywhere on the planet. Most black people were concerned about the "cotton curtain," the iron grip of the racist Southern police state here at home, and were less likely to buy into or embrace the American bourgeoisie's propaganda about an "Iron Curtain" Soviet threat.

The response of the racist Southern Democrats (the Dixiecrats) to the Brown ruling was one of organized terror and defiance from the highest-ranking officials on down. Francis M. Wilhoit described the role of the Democratic Party in The Politics of Massive Resistance'.
"For it was, after all, the region's political parties—particularly the dominant Democrats—that bore the chief responsibility for politicizing the segregationist masses and getting them to the polls on election day to vote for anti-integration candidates. Furthermore, since membership in Southern parties overlapped with membership in the Klan, the Councils, and other resistance groups, it appeared for a time that the segregationists would get a stranglehold on policy making in the racial area, and prevent even tokenism."

White Citizens' Councils, the suit-and-tie incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, formed to terrorize blacks through vigilante violence and uphold Jim Crow segregation, flourished throughout Mississippi. These councils, claiming a membership of 60,000, were headquartered in the very county that Emmett was preparing to visit. In May that year in Belzoni, Mississippi, Reverend George Lee, local NAACP organizer, was shot to death from a passing car. Just days prior to Till's arrival, WW II veteran Lamar Smith was gunned down in broad daylight on a crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi for urging black people to vote. This was the murderous atmosphere that a lively, self-confident teenager from the North journeyed into that fateful August.

On August 24, after picking cotton all morning, Emmett, his cousins and some friends drove into Money, Mississippi to purchase some candy and sodas at the local grocery store that serviced the black population. The white owner, Roy Bryant, was out of town and his young wife, Carolyn, was tending the store. There are conflicting stories of what happened at the store. Did he whistle? Was he trying to control his stutter? Did he speak up? The only thing that happened that day at the store for sure is that Emmett Till was seen as having "stepped out of line," ignoring "the customs of the South" in the presence of a white woman where this was punishable by death. On August 28, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Mi lam, came looking for Emmett at his relatives' home, kidnapping him in the dead of night. Three days later the hideously battered corpse of Emmett Till was found in the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Mose Wright, Emmett's great uncle, was able to identify his body only by a ring belonging to his lather that the child wore on his finger.

For the vast majority of unnamed lynch mob victims that have filled American history, the story would end here and would have also for Emmett Till if not for the courage and determination of his mother and family. Mamie Till-Mobley immediately alerted the press upon hearing that her son was missing. She fought to have her son's body returned to Chicago after the local sheriff hastily tried to bury the evidence—literally. She defied the Mississippi authorities by opening the padlocked and sealed casket. Most courageously, she insisted that the casket be displayed openly for the world to see, and ensured that graphic photos circulated internationally. An estimated 100,000-250,000 people waited in line for hours at Chicago's Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ to view the open casket. So shocking was Emmett's horrifically mutilated body that an estimated one out of every five individuals needed assistance out of the building. Emmett's death was transformed from "just another lynching" into an internationally known scandal. Although there had been thousands of Southern black men, women and children that met such horrible deaths, this was one that would spark a generation into action.

Mamie Till-Mobley set the tone by immediately demanding an investigation and publicizing the case. Although President Eisenhower and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover stonewalled her requests for an investigation, she persisted in bringing national attention to her son's lynching. Till-Mobley, her father and her cousin Rayfield Mooty, an Inland Steel worker, traveled to Sumner, Mississippi for the trial of Emmett's murderers and braved a gauntlet of white racists each morning as they entered the courthouse. Her uncle, Mose Wright, who had pleaded with Bryant and Milam not to take his nephew, did what virtually no black man in Mississippi had dared to do for nearly a century. He stood up in court and identified the two white men as the kidnappers. According to Wright's son, Simeon, who was in the same bed when Emmett was dragged away, Mose Wright was determined to testify. Knowing full well that he was risking the same fate as Emmett, he told his family that he didn't know if he would live or die, but he knew for sure that he was going to testify. Before Wright testified, the rest of his family had to be spirited away to Chicago. He joined them immediately following his testimony. Similarly an 18-year-old field hand, Willie Reed, came forward as a surprise witness for the prosecution to testify that he had heard Emmett's screams coming from Milam's barn. As soon as Reed stepped off the stand, he went directly to the train station and left for Chicago, rightly fearing for his life. He suffered a nervous breakdown upon arriving in Illinois. It took a tremendous amount of courage for these black witnesses to stand up to white racists in Mississippi, knowing they might not live to see another day, knowing that the only way to save themselves from the lynch rope was to leave everything behind and escape North. Their actions were not unlike slaves fleeing on the Underground Railroad nearly one hundred years earlier.

At this time, Medgar Evers, a Mississippi NAACP organizer, gained national attention. Evers understood that the only way a case would be built against Bryant and Milam was if he took it into his own hands and mobilized his forces. The NAACP recruited volunteers to dress as sharecroppers and sent them out to gather information. These brave individuals knew full well what lay in store for them should they be detected. Civil rights lawyer Conrad Lynn worked on the case and identified others involved in the killing, but they were never prosecuted. Dr. T. R. M. Howard, leader of the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, helped organize and contributed to pay the costs of the investigation and relocation of the witnesses. He also was eventually forced to flee North. He made speaking tours of the country to expose the reign of terror in Mississippi. For the smallest shred of hope that justice might be served, these people put their lives on the line.

But that smallest shred was really no shred at all in the mid '50s in the Mississippi Delta. The ensuing murder trial of Bryant and Milam was exactly what one would expect. All five lawyers in the county joined the defense team so that none could be appointed special prosecutor in the case. Neither of the defendants denied kidnapping Emmett. The jury came back with a verdict of not guilty in just over an hour. It took them "that long" because they stopped to get a soda, hoping to stretch the time for appearance's sake. The jury came up with the lie that the bloated, rotting body that was dragged out of the Tallahatchie River might not be Emmett at all, but a body planted by his mother and the NAACP. Emmett was supposedly alive and well in Detroit, according to the Southern racists. A grand jury would not even indict them on kidnapping charges. Then, just months after the acquittal, Look magazine published a confession by Bryant and Milam boasting of their lynching of Till.

A campaign orchestrated by plantation owner, arch-segregationist Mississippi Senator, James O. Eastland, tried to smear Emmett Till and his dead father Louis as rapists. The U.S. army had executed Louis Till in 1945. While serving in Italy, he was charged with raping two white women and killing another, charges that many who served with him stated were lies. The same man, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who as a general signed the execution order of the elder Till, sat as U.S. president and refused to investigate the lynching of the son. When Eastland managed to secure the army death records of Louis Till—the same records that Mamie Till-Mobley had been denied—and leaked them to the press, the

NAACP took a step back from the case, concerned to maintain their image of "respectability."
Louis Till was not the only man to be executed or "disappear" under such dubious circumstances during World War II. In her autobiography, Mamie Till-Mobley spoke to the chilling stories she heard from other black soldiers and friends of Louis Till of the "problem that followed them overseas from the United States." She described 3 a.m. line-ups of black soldiers by racist white officers and Military Police. A woman would be brought in to identify one of the soldiers and the "black soldiers who got pointed out at three in the morning were always taken away. They were not brought back." As Mamie Till-Mobley astutely pointed out,

"It seemed that the army really didn't need much more proof than a late-night identification to take black soldiers out. But based on what Louis's friends told me, it seemed the real offense wasn't always against white women. Often, it was really against white men. A number of women in those late-night lineups, it seems, were only identifying the men who slept with them, not men they were accusing of rape.... But for many of the white officers and soldiers from the South, there also was a custom about that sort of thing.... Louis died before he could see what would happen to his son. Bo [Emmett's nickname] died before he could learn about what had happened to his father. Yet they were connected in ways that ran as deep as their heritage, as long as their bloodline.... Maybe Emmett did wind up like his father, an echo of what had happened ten years earlier. Maybe they were both lynched."

Lynching—"As American as Baseball and Church Suppers"
In 1924, a young Communist from Indochina named Nguyen Ai Quoc—later known as Ho Chi Minh—wrote:

"It is well known that the Black race is the most oppressed and the most exploited of the human family. It is well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery, which was for centuries a scourge of the Negroes and a bitter disgrace for mankind. What everyone does not perhaps know is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching."

The story of Emmett Till lays bare the harsh reality of black life in a country built on human bondage. The fight for genuine black equality remains an unfinished task of the American Civil War. The 200,000 ex-slaves and Northern blacks who fought in that war helped turn the tide of the war in favor of the Union Army, but the victorious Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of equality. Radical Reconstruction was the most democratic period in U.S. history. But the Northern capitalists looked at the devastated South and saw opportunity—not for building radical democracy, but for profitably exploiting Southern resources and the freedmen. With the "Compromise of 1877," the last of the Northern troops were pulled from the South and Reconstruction came to an end. Freed blacks were disenfranchised, politically expropriated and kept segregated at the bottom of society. The institution of Jim Crow segregation began to take shape, marked by strict racial codes, returning the black population to a position of complete subservience, enforced by violence. How or when to address whites, where to live, eat, sit, shop, wash your hands, or take a drink of water were all strictly regulated and backed up through a system of race terror—the omnipresent threat of the lynch rope.

In the period following Reconstruction, in the late 19th century, lynching reached its height. Lynching is rightfully equated with the summary torture and execution of black people. But this was not always the case. The term "lynch law" is believed to have come from Judge Charles Lynch, a patriot in the American Revolutionary War. Upon discovery of a Tory conspiracy in 1780, Lynch was said to have presided over an extralegal court that meted out summary punishment to the pro-British Loyalists. Such methods were given free rein in a burgeoning young country with a vast frontier and a roughly established legal system. The evolution of lynching into an act of race terror is organically linked to the history of black chattel slavery. Lynching became a form of sadistic black subjugation in reaction to the rise of the anti-slavery abolition movement, developing into a widespread social phenomenon in the wake of the defeat of Reconstruction. By the end of the 19th century, "lynch law" had a specific meaning. At its height in the 1880s and 1890s, as many as two to three black people were lynched per week. Sociologist John Dollard wrote in 1937: "Every Negro in the South knows that he is under a kind of sentence of death; he does not know when his turn will come, it may never come, but it may also be any time."

American historian Leon F. Litwack has found that of the thousands of recorded lynchings, about 640 involved "accusations of a sexual nature"—the most notorious and hysteria-inducing accusation. The targets of the race terrorists were often those who owned competitive businesses and farms, the man who managed to acquire some property and was deemed by the racists to not have enough humility, the man who challenged the system, the man who was educated and/or prosperous. W. E. B. Dubois put it this way: "There was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency" (Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow [1998]).

In many cases, lynchings were not spontaneous mob violence but planned and advertised events bringing trainloads of spectators from near and far. These were ordinary, "church-going, upstanding" citizens, drawn together in a grotesque racist ritual. The "pillars of the community" were often directly involved or had prior knowledge, and they always approved afterward. "Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball and church suppers. Men brought their wives and children along to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic" (Philip Dray, At The Hands of Persons Unknown [2002]). Celebratory postcards of mutilated and charred bodies were sent through the U.S. mail to friends and relatives. James Baldwin noted on seeing the red clay hills of Georgia for the first time, "I could not suppress the thought that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees."

The Civil Rights Movement
As Mamie Till-Mobley remarked in a TV documentary, "When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before. Emmett's death was the opening of the civil rights movement." Ten thousand people rallied in Harlem the Sunday following the acquittal. Thousands packed meeting halls and overflowed into the streets to hear Mamie speak around the country. Labor rallies and demonstrations were held to protest the lynching of Emmett Till and race-terror in Mississippi. The CIO Steelworkers Union to which Fill's grandfather belonged wired the Mississippi governor demanding justice.

In the convulsive years that followed, social protest exploded into the civil rights movement. Eventually, Jim Crow, the poll taxes and sham rules that prevented black people from voting were abolished, and segregated schools and other public facilities were formally opened up. However, the civil rights movement was stopped cold when it came North and confronted the hardened economic foundations of black oppression, rooted in American capitalism. The heroic struggles of many thousands of black and white activists were betrayed by the liberal perspective of the leadership of the civil rights movement. Much as the organizers of the demonstrations against Till's murder appealed to Eisenhower, the strategy of the liberal-led civil rights movement was based on appeals to a section of the American bourgeoisie to right the historic wrongs done against black people, as though black freedom could be attained under the capitalist system.

There were important exceptions to this, exemplified by militant black leaders such as Robert F. Williams, the head of the NAACP branch in Monroe, North Carolina, which heavily recruited from the black working class of the area. Williams, who was denounced by liberal civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, put forward a program of armed self-defense to fight race-terror as opposed to reliance on the capitalist state and its politicians. This earned him the enmity of the liberal NAACP, which disowned him, as the FBI hounded him out of the country. Williams found refuge in Cuba in 1961 and then China, before returning to the U.S. in 1969. In 1965, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice organized patrols to protect blacks and civil rights workers. At about the same time, in Gulfport, Mississippi, the black longshoremen's union threatened to close the port down if civil rights activists were injured or arrested.

But despite determined struggle to fulfill the unfinished promise of the Civil War—the promise of black freedom— the civil rights movement could only go so far. The Democratic Party co-opted many of the black leaders into their ranks. They and their political heirs today sit on Capitol Hill, in the statehouses and city halls, administering this system which is based on racial injustice and class oppression, while posing as defenders of black and working people.
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The lynching of Emmett Till was not an aberration. Such inhuman acts of violence were part of the fabric of the American Jim Crow South—a system that could only be enforced through violence. Nor did the smashing of Jim Crow mark the end of racial oppression in the U.S., in the North or the South. The laws enforcing segregation may be abolished, but segregation and inequality remain as facts. The death penalty represents the lynch rope as the ultimate form of institutionalized state terror, backed in the streets by racist cops who carry out their own summary executions. The continued oppression of black people some 40 years after the inauguration of formal, legal equality demonstrates that black oppression is an intrinsic component of the capitalist order in the U.S.

The capitalist rulers promote the poison of racism to keep the working class divided—to pit white workers against black workers—in order to more easily maintain their rule. But black people are not simply victims. Black workers represent a large component of the organized labor movement. The way forward lies in multiracial class struggle. A key obstacle to this perspective is the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which ties the working class to its exploiters, particularly by promoting illusions in the Democratic Party as a "friend" of labor and blacks.

The road to black freedom lies in the struggle to shatter this racist capitalist system through proletarian socialist revolution, and the power to do that lies with the working class. But this power cannot and will not be realized unless a class-struggle labor movement actively champions the cause of black liberation. The key to unlocking the chains that shackle labor to its exploiters is the political struggle to build a revolutionary internationalist leadership of the working class.

At the time of the Civil War, Karl Marx, the founder of modern communism, captured a fundamental truth of American society in his statement that "labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." The Spartacist League fights to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will wrest the tremendous productive resources of this country out of the hands of the capitalist owners and put these resources into the hands of the working class, those who produce the wealth of this society. Only then will racial oppression be a thing of the past. Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!