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The Trotskyist stand on the woman question, like their approach to politics in general, is “left” in form and right in essence.
The views on the women’s struggle of the two major Trotskyist groupings in the U.S. – the Socialist Workers party (SWP) and the Workers League – also express the vacillating character of their movement in tailing after the spontaneity of the masses.
The two organizations appear to be fundamentally opposed on the issue. The SWP, for instance, considers itself to be “revolutionary feminist.” “If you love revolution,” goes one of their slogans, “then you’ll love feminism.”
The Workers League heads in another direction. “The feminist movement,” says one of their polemics against the SWP, “plays a reactionary role, splitting the working class and sowing the illusion that the problems of working class women could be solved apart from the fight for socialism. The movement is directed against the working class and the revolutionary party.”
In essence the two positions are the same. Both abandon the struggle for proletarian leadership of the mass democratic struggle for the emancipation of women.
The SWP bows to the spontaneity of the just struggle waged by the women of the middle classes. The Workers League, for its part, liquidates even the pretense of a Marxist-Leninist approach to the woman question and tails after the spontaneous economic struggles of the workers at the point of production.
Both are similar in another respect. Both identify the entire women’s movement with the feminist trend. The Workers League does this in the guise of dismissing the movement as “middle class reformism.” The SWP view takes this form:
“Feminism,” writes Linda Jenness in the April 27, 1973 Militant, “is where women are out fighting for things that are in their interest. Feminism is wherever women are challenging the traditional roles assigned to them.”
The Workers League, of course, has no influence in the women’s movement, except as a negative example that strengthens conservative and anti-communist trends.
The SWP, however, plays a more pernicious role. It considers itself an uncompromising champion of women’s rights and by adapting itself to feminism, has gained a following for its ideas among a section of the middle class youth.
The SWP gives a “left” cover to its views by concentrating its attack on the family as the principal institution perpetuating the oppression of women. “The feminist movement today,” states the SWP’s 1971 convention resolution entitled Towards a Mass Feminist Movement, “started out by questioning the basic structure and institutions of this society, especially the family.” Caroline Lund, writing in the October 1970 International Socialist Review adds, “The oppression of women by other institutions has been directly related to their role in the family.”
In this, she follows the lead of Trotsky. While he gave the appearance of championing the cause of Soviet women and criticised some mistaken positions of the CPSU – e.g. banning abortions at one time – he too panicked over the tasks of socialist construction, and launched a utopian attack on the family.
Lund goes on to attack the idea of struggling for equality within the family: “Women have had enough of being so-called partners! We want to be whole individuals, with our own lives and aspirations. There should be no ‘head of the family,’ neither a man nor a woman, no domination of human beings over other human beings – including children.” As for the youth, they too should abandon the struggle in that arena. “Young people,” she says, “cannot as a rule work out their own lives satisfactorily until they break from their families.”
The Marxist-Leninist movement should have no illusions about the character of the family nor romanticize its traditional role, which Engels described as one of the pillars of class society. It is not the role of the proletarian movement, however, to center its attack on the family nor to call for its abolition. The imperialists themselves are causing its erosion, as the fact that one out of three marriages now ends in divorce shows at a glance.
The point is that there is no mass alternative to the nuclear family in capitalist society or even in the first stages of socialist construction. Without the family unit, working women with children would have to abandon even the minimal protections that it affords.
This is why the workers’ movement, in the course of the struggle for socialism, aims to win jobs for women, emphasizes the daycare struggle and raises the fight for equality within the family, for husbands to share equally in the responsibilities of the home.
As to what form the family will take under fully developed communism, Engels said there could only be speculation and that it was a task for future generations to decide. In the first stages of socialism, however, he said that the working-class family would probably take a purely monogamous form for the first time, since in capitalist society monogamy was, in practice, primarily for the woman.
Perhaps an analogy can be drawn with the state. In his polemics with the anarchists, Lenin agreed that the classless society would have no state. History and class struggle, however, have determined the need for a transitional proletarian state that would only wither away with the dying out of classes and class struggle. Thus it would be incorrect to call for the abolition of any type of state or the abolition of the workers’ state just after the seizure of power.
But to the Trotskyists the fact that the monogamous nuclear family continues to exist in socialist countries like China and to develop along lines of greater equality for women is not seen as a progressive step forward. Instead it is slandered as “a reformist policy continuing the subjugation of women and reinforcing a bureaucratic caste.”
Tile Trotskyists also capitulate to the feminist trend by raising the idea of “sisterhood” and placing it above the class struggle in practice.
“The truth is,” states the SWP’s 1971 document, “that women are at the same time united by sexual oppression and divided by class society.”
It is true that there are two aspects to the oppression of women by male supremacy. The principal aspect. is a class question, the antagonistic contradiction between the masses of women and the imperialists. The secondary aspect is a non-antagonistic contradiction among the people, the contradiction between men and women.
Thus even the women of the exploiting classes – to a certain extent and in a limited way – share in the general oppression of women and as a consequence can make a contribution to the united front. But this potential unity among primarily working-class and middle-class women can develop in a progressive way only through the struggle for leadership by the proletarian women and their class outlook within the united front against imperialism, one of the spearheads of which is the mass democratic women’s movement. If left to spontaneity, the class contradiction between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie becomes primary and the movement remains fragmented.
This is exactly what the SWP does. In place of the leading role of the proletariat, it substitutes the idealist notion of “inherent logic.” In answering the question of which will become primary, the unity or division in the women’s movement, the SWP states: “Sisterhood is powerful because of this universal female oppression, and this is the basis for the existence of an independent, nonexclusive, mass feminist movement with an anti-capitalist logic.”
Thus “sisterhood” prevails over class struggle and the role of the working women is reduced to the obvious comment that they have “the most to gain” from democratic reforms.
The SWP likes to claim that it is building the women’s movement among the masses. In addition to the fact that it is raising a petty bourgeois line; this claim is not even true by their own admission. At a time when the rising trend in the women’s movement is developing among the working women, particularly in the daycare battles being led by third world working women, the SWP focuses its attention on the women students. “Building campus women’s liberation groups,” says the SWP, “is a key task, since the campus groups are the largest and fastest growing sector of the movement.”
The particular concerns of this section of women, while part of the woman question in general, are reflected in the emphasis the SWP puts forward in its line and tactics. Most women students do not have children, family responsibilities or jobs. Many are still under the thumb of parental authority or in the process of rebelling against it, and this is manifested in the SWP’s concentrated fire on the family.
But the main reflection is in the Trotskyist’s approach hi the struggle to repeal anti-abortion laws. Here the SWP has focused on the abortion question as the most important issue of the women’s movement, raised it in isolation and refused to raise other demands such as childcare and job equality together with it in united front coalitions. The result has been obvious. Now that the reform has been won, the “single-issue” coalitions have disintegrated and the Trotskyists are floundering in a quandary over what to do next.
But the SWP has had some success. Its single-issue approach made its contribution to increasing the divisions in the women’s movement. The refusal to unite the abortion struggle with the movement for daycare, for instance, has the consequence of failing to combat the prejudice among some sections of the masses that the women’s struggle is against children and aimed at destroying the family.
At the same time that the SWP conducts a semi-anarchist attack on the family, emphasizing the neo-Freudian idealism of Wilhelm Reich, they draw back one step from the logical conclusion of demanding its abolition. Instead, in classic form, they switch over to reformism.
“The heart of the struggle for liberation,” states the SWP’s 1971 statement, “is not toward counter-institutionism, but fighting to wrest the vast resources ... away from the ruling classes.”
The difference between “wresting away resources” and expropriating the expropriators through the proletarian dictatorship is the difference between reform.and revolution, between revisionism and Marxism-Leninism.
“The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production must be strongly brought out,” Lenin told Clara Zetkin in 1920. “That will draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism. And it will also supply the basis for regarding the woman question as a part of the social question, of the workers’ problem, and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the revolution.”
The SWP’s failure in this regard is followed by its general extension into the modern revisionist theory of “structural reform.”
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Last updated on 13.11.2002