First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 40, October 17, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The maneuvers of the revisionist Communist Party U.S.A. around the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) provide a good example of their opportunism and treachery in the workers’ movement.
In July 1973, Judy Edelman, member of the CPUSA Women’s Commission, spelled out the Party’s position on the ERA. In a pamphlet entitled “Women on the Job: The Communist View,” she stated emphatically that the CPUSA “has always opposed and continues to oppose the ERA in its present form.” Edelman called on people to work against its passage.
Again last year in the March issue of their theoretical journal, Political Affairs, the revisionists wrote a major article opposing the ERA. They claimed that “careful deliberation concerning ... the best interests of the working class, and ... working class women in particular, showed the amendment is actually “dangerous.”
Yet in the past several months the CPUSA’s newspaper, the Daily World, has been virtually silent on the ERA. What’s more, Women for Racial and Economic Equality (WREE), a group started by the CPUSA, passed a resolution supporting the amendment at their first national convention Oct. 1-2. The Daily World didn’t mention it.
A phone call to the Daily World office shed some light on the matter. The CPUSA has not changed its opposition to the ERA, the staff member said, “but we’re not opposing it in a big way because it’s such an issue in the women’s movement.
“If you don’t know, you’d think we were for it,” she went on, commenting on the silence of the Daily World.
The revisionists, like all opportunists, scurry to win approval from the masses while harboring utter contempt for them. The movement for the ERA has mush-roomed, with tens of thousands marching to demand its passage. Faced with a threat to their legitimacy in the women’s movement and divisions in their own ranks over the ERA, the revisionists apparently decided to let WREE take a position of qualified support for the bill. As to their own position of opposing its passage, the CPUSA simply shut up.
The revisionists’ view of the ERA is another example of their complete abandonment of Marxist-Leninist principles.
On one hand, communists fight for reforms that will improve the conditions of the working class and its ability to fight. As Lenin said, by fighting for reforms “we demonstrate ... that we hate – yes, hate – and want to remove whatever oppresses and harasses the working woman, the wife of the worker ... and even in many respects the woman of the propertied classes.” (Clara Zetkin, “My Recollections of Lenin”). This is why our Party supports the ERA.
On the other hand, no amount of reforms can change the nature of capitalism, which thrives off the exploitation of women. So revolutionaries link the struggle for reforms with the overall fight to smash capitalism and replace it with socialism.
The revisionists oppose this particular reform, the ERA, but only to glorify reformism. They object to the ERA because they say it is “too vague” and could be used against women by Congress and the courts. To prevent this they recommend “concrete legislation” like their so-called Women’s Bill of Rights.
Since the Congress and the courts are arms of the capitalists, they will of course defend their interests when even possible. For example, they will certainly try to use the ERA to wipe out women’s protective legislation on the basis that it “discriminates” against men.
But just as the masses can force concessions like the ERA from the capitalists, they can also prevent legislation and other reforms from being used in the capitalists’ interests. What accomplishes this, however, is not the wording of a bill, as the revisionists preach, but the strength and militant action of the workers’ movement.
The revisionist CPUSA seeks hegemony over the women’s movement in order to choke it with the noose of reformism and electoral struggle. They may try to hide their views on the ERA to keep from being isolated. But they will never be able to cover up their betrayal of the struggle for women’s equality.