Women and Revolution

FSP: "Radical" Liberals in a Lather

In our article, “Anti-Woman Bigotry and Gillard’s ‘Misogyny’ Speech; ALP Government: Enemy of Workers and Oppressed” (ASp No. 218, Summer 2012-13), we explained that the road to women’s emancipation, and to eradicating all forms of social oppression, lies in mobilising the power of the multiracial working class in a successful revolutionary struggle to uproot capitalism. In putting forward our Marxist program for women’s liberation through socialist revolution we polemicised against the bourgeois ideology of feminism and criticised feminist-led demonstrations such as the annual “Reclaim the Night” march with its history of appealing to the capitalist state.

The “socialist feminists” of the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) have responded with a rancorous article in the January issue of their Freedom Socialist Organiser (FSO), also taking aim at Socialist Alternative (SAlt) for having criticised Melbourne’s “Reclaim the Night” rally last year. Making an amalgam between our Marxist politics and SAlt’s reformism, the FSP engage in crude slanders of us both. There is plenty to polemicise against with SAlt’s wretched Cliffite politics, but to condemn their 22 November article, “Jill Meagher, Reclaim the Night and the political right,” as “effectively an apology for rape and murder” sounds more like the language of crazed anti-communist feminists than any brand of “socialist.”

Likewise, the FSP just lie about our supposed “abstention from the struggle for women’s liberation” and “wallowing in misogyny,” well aware of our party’s solid record on the fight against women’s oppression, not least the struggle for abortion rights. In an attempt to vilify us, they assert the SL only “grudgingly concedes” that the 300-strong rally in defence of East Melbourne’s Fertility Control Clinic last November was a “good thing,” adding the lying sneer that we’ve boycotted monthly clinic defence actions for eight years. What really irks the FSP is that not only are we for mass struggle to defend the clinics, joining such actions when we can to stand with others against the bigots and the state, but we also argue against reformist illusions and for the need to mobilise the social power of the working class. Thus, we note the FSP did not address our criticism of the wretched demand raised at last year’s mass action which appealed to the woman-hating Catholic Church. In truth, the FSP employ their false amalgams, wild slanders and pseudo-Marxist mumbo jumbo in order to attack basic Marxism and Leninism, and cover their own naked reformism.

FSP: Unabashed Reformists

The FSP would have their readership believe that Melbourne’s “Reclaim the Night” (RTN) protest last October was a proletarian-centred mobilisation that stood in sharp opposition to the capitalist state. They enthuse, “Between RTN speakers and the sea of placards the connection of sexism to racism and class exploitation was made crystal clear.” On the contrary, what is clear is that the FSP’s understanding of these questions is far from Marxist. The placards in photos of their own contingent—from “Sexism is a social disease: Stamp it out NOW!” to “I am marching to END sexism NOT for CCTV cameras to film it!”—don’t make any such connection. The FSP disappear calls by speakers such as Socialist Alliance’s Margarita Windisch to pressure the capitalist state not only until it takes assault and domestic violence “seriously,” but “until our[!] troops are not used to invade other countries and kill our sisters” (Green Left Weekly, 31 October 2012)! And they disregard “Reclaim the Night” organisers thanking the police for their support.

The history of “Reclaim the Night,” with its not-so-thinly veiled appeals to strengthen the state and its repressive apparatus, particularly the cops, shows how easily protest against random violence and crime is steered in a reactionary direction. Indeed, in a racist, capitalist country such as Australia, “crime” is invariably a rallying cry for the forces of state repression and racist reaction. Feminist-led, reformist-backed mobilisations such as “Reclaim the Night” serve at best to obscure the central source of violence against women in this society—the capitalist state and the institution of the family.

When it comes to last year’s “Reclaim the Night” in Melbourne, the FSP dismisses all concerns around the question of strengthening the hand of the state. As already shown, their assurances should be taken with more than a grain of salt. The FSP have long campaigned for “community control” of the police. Calling to “Hold the police to account” via “elected community-based review boards” that would supposedly act as “mechanisms for communities to investigate and prosecute police,” the FSP in fact preach that the armed fist of the capitalist state can be directed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed. In 1999, claiming to oppose Australian imperialist troops to East Timor, they nevertheless joined the chauvinist “troops in” rallies along with much of the reformist left. And in the 1980s, imbibing in Cold War II anti-communism, the FSP tendency joined the chorus of anti-Soviet left groups who championed the Catholic-reactionary Solidarność movement, which spearheaded capitalist counterrevolution in Poland. A key aim of this clerical-nationalist outfit was to ban abortion. Typical of the FSP’s abject reformism, they recently called for a massive increase in public housing funds “by redirecting spending priorities from the military and immigration detention and through taxing big corporations!” They unashamedly declared in their paper (FSO, January 2013) that they were “Taking a message to the Victorian government: the priorities are wrong!”

Marxism vs. Feminism

Insinuating that the SL does not stand in defence of women or any other specially oppressed sector of society, the FSP declare that we Spartacists “view class” through a “narrow, mid-20th century lens.” In fact, we’re even more old-fashioned than that! We base ourselves on the program of Lenin and Trotsky; our model goes back to the 1917 Russian Revolution, when the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky led the working class to the seizure of state power and undertook concrete measures to liberate women from household slavery and integrate them into social production.

All laws against homosexuality were abolished by the early Soviet state; marriage and divorce were made civil procedures removed from the control of religion. Recognising that the material basis of women’s oppression is in the first instance the institution of the family, the revolutionary regime sought, even under conditions of dire material poverty, to establish childcare facilities, communal kitchens and the like as a first step toward emancipating women not just on the terrain of ideas but in reality. Many Bolshevik women workers were among the vanguard—far from “wallowing in misogyny,” they were breaking down the barriers of religious obscurantism, illiteracy, legal prohibitions against abortion, homosexuality and divorce, laying the material basis to replace the family.

So what’s the FSP’s model? Their embrace of Polish Solidarność exemplifies where they stand on defending against counterrevolution those countries where capitalism has been overthrown. They repudiate the centrality of the struggle of labour against capital in favour of embracing and glorifying various currents of petty-bourgeois radicalism. The FSP are sectoralists who begin from the premise that the basic actors on the left are separate movements of different oppressed social groups, based on gender (feminism), sexual orientation (gay liberation) or race and ethnicity (“people of colour”). They view themselves as representing these diverse sectors, integrating and balancing their particular interests and demands.

Writing off “privileged” white male workers as incorrigibly reactionary bigots, long-time U.S. FSP leader, Clara Fraser, proclaimed in 1980 that these “lackeys of the bosses” are “being swiftly replaced and ignored by the army of new worker militants from the ranks of women, youth, minorities and lesbian/gays” (Freedom Socialist, December 1980). As our SL/U.S. comrades have noted, underlying this hostile contempt toward white male workers is profound despair toward the prospects for a socialist revolution in the United States. (We refer readers to “Revolutionary Integrationism—The Road to Black Freedom,” [Workers Vanguard Nos. 864 & 865, 17 February and 3 March 2006] and “Personalism as a ‘Political’ Program” [WV No. 559, 18 September 1992]).

The absurdly false title of the FSP’s January article, “On the Centrality of Feminism to the Liberation of the Working Class,” captures how far removed they are from the perspective of socialist revolution. Marxism was “old hat” for the 1960s-70s New Left “radicals” and it is “old hat” for the FSP today. While the FSP protest that “socialist feminism” has “nothing in common with any bourgeois ideology,” they in fact confirm our analysis of feminism. Denying the material source of women’s oppression they attribute the “root cause of such anti-woman hatred [as last year’s brutal rape and murder of Jill Meagher]” to “systemic sexism,” i.e., bad ideas. Underscoring that they deny the primacy of class divisions in society, and are ready to unite with their bourgeois “sisters,” they assert, “It is the cross-class nature of sexism that gives women’s struggle its character independent of the class struggle” (emphases in original).

Thus, they lament discrimination against Westpac CEO Gail Kelly and “royal” Kate Middleton. Kelly, the “lowest paid” and “only woman” bank chief, officially received $9.6 million last financial year and has sacked thousands. She was a key representative of Australian imperialism at the recent World Economic Forum. As for Middleton, she is not simply a “breeding machine” as the FSP assert, but a representative of the reactionary British monarchy. Moreover, this feudalistic hangover still has the power to dismiss elected governments in Australia. In fact, at the appointment of “Her Majesty” the Queen, Australia now has its first female governor-general, who can sack an elected government, maybe even the current one headed by the first female prime minister.

The FSP’s invention of “socialist feminism” serves as their means to disappear any class line amongst those who seek to oppose anti-woman bigotry. For them, feminism encompasses a range of views with those like themselves being the more “advanced.” They view feminism as an “unbroken chain” that is always correct and if you are not for a feminist then you’re a misogynist. Thus the FSP throw at us the charge of “Radical Labourism,” a term they define as “based on the outdated and sexist—as well as homophobic and racist—view of the working class that...it is primarily male, white, straight and is concentrated in heavy industry.”

For the FSP to label us “Labourites” is pretty rich. While claiming to champion women’s rights, they rarely, if ever, challenge the predominantly white pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy. Notably, the FSP have nothing to say in their polemic about either the Gillard Labor government or the trade-union misleaders while attacking our article that excoriates both. Indeed, pushing the lie that “women’s liberation can only be won by a movement of radical women” (Freedom Socialist Bulletin, Summer/Autumn 2005), they in fact alibi the union misleaders’ sellout role by relegating this struggle to “women’s work.”

It is the working class that has the social power, organisation and historic interest to lead all of the oppressed in a struggle to sweep away the entire barbaric capitalist system. What’s necessary is a political struggle to replace the pro-capitalist Laborite trade-union misleaders with a class-struggle leadership that fights in the interest of all the oppressed and is linked to a revolutionary Leninist-Trotskyist party. Unless the proletariat breaks from nationalism, racism and anti-woman bigotry, it will not achieve the level of class consciousness necessary to make a workers revolution.

For New October Revolutions!

It comes as no surprise that the FSP’s article, which includes their own potted history of the last century, never mentions the Russian Revolution, the defining event of the 20th century. Nor do they so much as note the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991-92, trampling on the rights of women and all working people. The FSP prefer to complain that “we still hear positions that are 100 years old” applied to the working class. No doubt they take umbrage that our model is the Bolshevik-led October Revolution and that we proudly stand on its achievements. The Bolsheviks fought to liberate women long before Clara Fraser invented “socialist feminism”! As Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin said, “The first proletarian dictatorship is truly paving the way for the complete social equality of women. It eradicates more prejudice than volumes of feminist literature” (My Recollections of Lenin, Clara Zetkin, excerpted in On the Emancipation of Women, V.I. Lenin, Progress Publishers, 1977).

For their part, having made peace with the capitalist status quo, the FSP find raising the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or calling “for new October Revolutions” merely “inaccessible,” “internal Left language” and “hyper-revolutionary phrases.” It underscores that these “radical” liberals, and their “socialist feminism,” are roadblocks to the necessary fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution.