A recent argument in these pages held that the difference between the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International tradition on women’s liberation is no longer a difference of theory, and that where the two part company is autonomy: who organises separately, and through what. That argument leaned, in turn, on a single editorial from Socialist Woman in the spring of 1974. Printed below is the longer document that stands behind that editorial: Leonora Lloyd and Laurie White’s ‘Revolutionary Organisation and Women’s Liberation’, from the July–August 1973 issue of the same paper. It is worth reading not as a relic but as one of the most sustained early attempts by this tradition to answer a question it has never entirely closed.
First, what it is. Socialist Woman was the paper of the International Marxist Group, the British section of the Fourth International — the lineage that runs down through Anti-Capitalist Resistance to this publication, which takes the name the IMG’s main paper of those years also carried. Writing in the summer of 1973, Lloyd — who co-edited Socialist Woman and compiled its booklist for women’s liberation — and White address a specific conjuncture: the women’s liberation movement five years past its post-1968 surge, a socialist current growing inside it, and, as the authors note with some satisfaction, Selma James’s anti-trade-union positions just defeated at the movement’s last conference. The question they set themselves is the relationship between the revolutionary organisation and the WLM, and they call it, with justice, overdue.
The argument has a shape worth stating plainly, because it is easy to misread from a single line. Faced with male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisations, Lloyd and White write, the radical-feminist answer is to build an autonomous women’s movement, and ‘this is an incorrect solution’. Lifted out, that sentence reads like a refusal of women’s autonomous organisation as such, and it is nothing of the kind. The IMG stood for autonomous women’s organisation: Socialist Woman was a women-run paper, the tradition defended the right of women to caucus inside the IMG and across the broader movement, and that autonomous organising was understood as integral to the work, not a retreat from it. What Lloyd and White reject is something narrower: the move of counterposing autonomous women’s organisation to cross-gender organisations like the IMG itself — treating autonomy as an answer to the problem of male-dominated parties, a way out rather than a lever within. Their prescription is not to retreat from autonomous organising but to combine it with a perpetual struggle to make the revolutionary organisation itself an instrument against male chauvinism in its own ranks.
What gives the document its force is its candour about that chauvinism. Lloyd and White do not treat it as a matter of individual bad attitudes. They treat it as structural: women under-represented in positions of responsibility, ‘women’s work’ sealed off as the business of women alone, the sexual division of labour outside the party reproduced inside it, what the article, borrowing a phrase from Lenin, calls ‘feminism à la rebours’, feminism turned upside down. And they reach for a cautionary example that has lost none of its edge: the German Social Democracy, which built separate women’s structures and then used them to park the woman question in a set of economic demands on one side and a vision for the distant future on the other. The warning is exact. A party can take women’s oppression seriously in its programme and still ghettoise the work, and the ghetto is a way of not doing it.
Two notes for the careful reader, in keeping with how this publication handles its sources. The long passage the article attributes to Alexandra Kollontai, on the SPD’s indifference to agitation among women, is the authors’ working paraphrase rather than a verbatim quotation. It is broadly consistent with her writing on the woman question, including her 1909 essay ‘The Social Basis of the Woman Question’, but several of its sentences are not hers, and it should be read as their gloss on Kollontai, not as her own words. The phrase ‘feminism à la rebours’, which the article attributes to Lenin, reaches us through the literature of his reported conversations rather than from anything he set down himself, and like the Kollontai passage it is safer treated as the tradition’s received wording than as a verified quotation. The text printed here is taken from a scan of poor resolution; passages occluded by the page’s photograph of Helke Sander or lost in the density of the type are marked, and a handful remain genuinely illegible. We print the document with its uncertainties visible rather than smoothed, because a primary source is worth more honest than tidy.
That warning about the SPD is why the document belongs next to the argument about the SWP rather than in an archive. The structure Lloyd and White diagnose — women’s work separated off and left to women with no purchase on the organisation as a whole — is recognisable in the structure that, carried to its conclusion in a different tradition, produced the disputes committee that failed two women in 2013. The 1973 article is the theory of what should have prevented it: not autonomous organisation counterposed to the party, but a party so transformed by the women’s struggle that it could be trusted to police itself. Whether any party can be trusted that far is the question 2013 leaves open, and the question this document, for all its seriousness, does not answer. Lloyd and White close where the tradition kept closing, on the working class as the agent: women’s liberation, they write, ‘situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat’. The only social force. Feminists to the IMG’s left heard in that framing the same subordination by another route, and the argument they started has run for fifty years without resolution.
Read it, then, as neither vindication nor embarrassment. It is the Fourth International’s British section, in 1973, getting a great deal right about male chauvinism in its own house and leaving one large thing unresolved, the same thing the tradition is still arguing about in the conference halls this summer. Republish it not because it settles the question, but because it shows the question being worked, half a century ago, by people who already knew it was hard, and who got further with it than their reputation now allows.
Revolutionary Organisation and Women’s Liberation
Leonora Lloyd and Laurie White
Socialist Woman, July–August 1973, pp. 9–12
The continuing debate inside the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) about the relation between women’s liberation and the class struggle, the massive rejection of Selma James’s anti-trade-union positions at the last WLM conference, and the growth of a socialist current within the WLM, make an article on the relationship between the revolutionary organisation (the Leninist Party) and that layer of people identified around the question of women’s oppression and loosely grouped in the WLM timely, not to say overdue.
Discussion inside both the WLM and the revolutionary groups on the relation between capitalism and women’s oppression, the class struggle and women’s struggle, Marxism and feminism, has overshadowed and been sidelined by a failure to confront the key problem of defining the relationship between the WLM and the revolutionary organisation — which is a specific instance of a more general relationship between the revolutionary organisation on the one hand and on the other the ‘new vanguard’ constituted by all those who have become radicalised during the big upturn in the class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries since 1967–68. Nor has this problem been explicitly taken up either by those militants of the left groups who are also active in the WLM or by members of the WLM who reject the revolutionary groups as male-dominated. The preconditions for transforming the present WLM into a movement of mass proportions require that the revolutionary organisation become capable of playing a leading role in this process. The problem is urgent; in this article we can only make a preliminary attempt to define it.
WOMEN’S POLITICS v. LENINISM
Revolutionary Marxists active in the WLM find themselves confronted with a specific ideology which argues that the Leninist theory of organisation has no relevance — certainly no immediate relevance — to women’s struggle against their oppression. For some ex-comrades the question of party is a distant one; for others a distraction. Many feel that adherence to a socialist party demands a submission of their feminist politics to the political practice of the party. Unlike the organisations of the working class, which are seen as bureaucratic and male-dominated, the WLM is seen as totally democratic. This form of ‘community politics’ is not difficult to identify as a reflection of anti-Leninist politics — neither social-democratic nor Leninist but a species of socialist feminism accepted even by those who claim adherence to Marxism. Those who accept this ‘community politics’ position accept it as the belief that the WLM is women’s answer to Leninism.
There have been various attempts inside the WLM to provide a ‘scientific’ basis for the concept of women’s politics, a concept which leads to the view that women’s oppression has the same priority as class — or indeed a greater one — in contemporary society. This view stems from theorists of, for example, the mode of reproduction, who reject the terrain of historical materialism from the outset. They postulate an inverse relationship between the sphere of production and the mode of reproduction, or set up a model of capitalism in which the two compete for dominance. This argument is taken up elsewhere in this issue of SW¹; what is relevant here is that in these theories the fundamental category of Marxism — class — is replaced by the category of ‘sex’, and the Leninist theory of organisation is rejected as irrelevant to the specific oppression of women.
Revolutionary Marxists have dismissed the concept of women’s politics without trying to understand precisely why anti-Leninism is so strong in the WLM. The reasons are complex, but we can identify three broad factors.
a) The origins of this politics are to be found in the historical and political characteristics of the rise of the WLM. The mass vanguard, of which the WLM is an important and integral part, arose first of all on the basis of solidarity with the people’s wars — Cuba, China, Vietnam — and was strengthened by a deep crisis of confidence in the imperialist metropolises. This radicalisation took place outside the traditional organisations of the working class and in reaction against the bureaucratic and personal attitudes of their male and female members.
b) The continuing dominance of this politics inside the WLM cannot be reduced to the fact that the movement is young. It has continued to grow and produce a considerable literature and has not been overcome by its entry into political arenas. The WLM has survived all predictions of its imminent disappearance and has generally responded very positively to the upturn in struggle of the last two years. The fact that it continues to hold this layer of the mass vanguard is a direct consequence of the failure of the revolutionary groups to react sufficiently swiftly, or in an adequate fashion, to this layer in relation to the class struggle.
c) At the level of theory, the revolutionary left has largely failed to understand the precise connection between the oppression of women and the class struggle, and how the basic contradiction of the system affects the family. While work on the woman question has been done, it has been approached in a sectional fashion and has been very much influenced by the theoretical production of the WLM itself. Ironically, instead of the revolutionary left hegemonising the ideological field, it has largely been hegemonised by the WLM on this question. This is a real crisis of the revolutionary vanguard.
A further factor concerns the history of Leninism. The anti-Leninism of the present WLM results from a superficial examination of women’s oppression that leads to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with the oppression of one class by another under capitalism. After all, what is the position of women in the non-capitalist countries? A great deal has been achieved there, but women’s liberation has not followed. The explanation can only be given in terms of the concrete history of women and of the degeneration of the first workers’ state and the international Communist movement.
The role of the WLM does not rest on these fundamentals. It does not rest on the claim that the working class is the only revolutionary force capable of completing the transition to the socialist order. What it does do is to undermine all workerist and economistic conceptions of the revolutionary left, and all opportunist theories of mass struggle. It is increasingly realised that the WLM cannot take on mass proportions without joining the working-class struggle and that the struggle for women’s liberation must be situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat.
MALE CHAUVINISM IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION
A major contribution of the WLM has been to document in great detail all aspects of women’s social inferiority. The social division of labour between men and women in capitalist society is reflected at all levels, including within the organisations of the working class. As long as women are oppressed in society at large, men will tend to have a majority over women in the revolutionary party. The social division of labour between men and women makes it hard for female comrades to be as active as male ones. The subordinate position of women in society at large means that women’s work has certain specific features due to the specificity of women’s social situation. The very fact of women’s oppression gives rise to special demands — labour protection of nursing mothers, crèches, struggle against prostitution, and so on.
The problem of male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisation cannot be reduced to the personal attitudes of its male and female members. It affects the overall practice of these organisations. The number of women in positions of responsibility is invariably much smaller than would be expected from their numerical strength in the organisation as a whole. This means a massive under-utilisation of the talents and skills of the membership, a failure to realise its full political potential. Male chauvinism is also visible in the relative lack of importance given by organisations to work among the masses on the question of women’s oppression. Documents and platforms tend to treat the question of women’s oppression as something separate from the mainstream of the class struggle, as an area of work which is basically the responsibility of women. This results in the effective autonomy of this work from other activities of the organisation. Persistent organisational divisions which at each stage appear to be justified by purely tactical decisions in effect reproduce the sexual division of labour inside the organisation — what Lenin called ‘feminism à la rebours’.
Thus in a number of very concrete ways male chauvinism transcends the framework of personal attitudes and becomes an obstacle to the transformation of the organisation into a revolutionary party capable of leading the political struggle of the proletariat at all levels of society. A party under the sway of male chauvinism will be severely hampered in its efforts to bring the broad masses into revolutionary struggle. Moreover, once the political power of the bourgeoisie is overthrown, such a party will not be capable of leading the working masses in the construction of socialism.
It is instructive here to consider a historical example: the German Social-Democratic Party at the beginning of the century. As is well known, the SPD held that while it was absolutely necessary for the proletariat to conquer political power, it was not necessary that the existing state should be smashed. The parliamentary struggle was of paramount importance and provided the ground upon which it built its entire political strategy. The founding question of the SPD was the democratic equality of all, regardless of sex or race, and this was written into its programme.
But for a long time this was just so many words — until the question of electoral reform became an acute political problem. As Kollontai reports: ‘The Party’s indifference to the question of women’s oppression had deep and vital roots in the following: while women were deprived of political rights, the involvement of women in party politics had less significance for the immediate success of the Social Democrats than enlisting men among the male proletariat. Agitation among women workers was something which the social democratic party could pursue only for the remote future. The question of radical reform of the electoral system brought women less into the circle of the political fight. Getting women workers, these possible future voters, into the Party life acquired a topical interest.’
The main principle around which the SPD organised its work in this field was that of separation and autonomy of action among women. This was justified on the basis that, although the women’s struggle was inseparable from the general working-class struggle, it had certain specific features due to the specificity of women’s social situation. For women to become politicised required a far more radical break with traditional morals, concepts and customs than was the case for men. All these factors were seen as demanding a separate structure for agitation among women: a committee, bureaux, etc., staffed by women. The Central Committee of the party always had a woman comrade in charge of this area of work. The Party held separate meetings and conferences for women and formed intercessory organisations for them. At the same time it was held to be the responsibility of women comrades to draw the Party’s attention to the interests of women workers. In this way the sexual division of labour operating outside the party was reproduced within it, and what appeared at first sight to be purely technical decisions dictated by the realities of the social situation of women turned out to separate off ‘women’s work’ and leave it to women comrades. The question of women’s liberation became a matter of, on the one hand, a series of economic and bourgeois-democratic demands and, on the other, a vision for the distant future.
Faced with the persistence of male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisations, the radical feminist solution is to build an ‘autonomous’ movement of women. As we tried to show elsewhere¹, this is an incorrect solution.
We have also argued that to expect the revolutionary organisation to be totally free of male chauvinism is to fail to understand the material roots of this ideology. But this does not mean that one simply accepts it. On the contrary, it is necessary to wage a perpetual struggle to make the revolutionary organisation of the working class into an effective instrument for combating male chauvinism — both within its own ranks and within the working class — through conscious effort and continuous education of its cadres.
The position of women in the countries where capitalism has been overthrown can be analysed within the theoretical framework we have tried to sketch above. WLM literature often addresses the reasons for the relatively limited political advance made by women in non-capitalist societies, and has identified at least two levels: the economic and cultural underdevelopment of the countries where the revolution has been successful (often coupled with severe imperialist interventionism) and the inadequacy of classical Marxism in relation to the complex nature of women’s oppression. However, while these factors have certainly played a fundamental role, they are not sufficient to explain the present position of women in these countries. In order to understand what went wrong one needs to understand not only the nature of the contradictions in societies in transition from capitalism to socialism but also the role of the subjective factor — the revolutionary party — in overcoming these contradictions. Thus the bureaucratisation and the subsequent degeneration of the Russian Communist Party was a determining factor in the progressive degeneration of the early Soviet state — a degeneration which was by no means inevitable.
The repeal in the thirties and forties of much of the Bolshevik legislation that had, after October, laid the foundation for the legal, social and political equality of women was an integral part of the Stalinist counter-revolution. Any scientific discussion of the role of women in transitional societies can only be carried out within this double theoretical framework: the contradictions of non-capitalist transitional societies and the historical origins and mechanisms of the degeneration of the workers’ state. One of the great contributions of Trotsky to revolutionary theory was to document and elaborate the theory of that degeneration, against which he fought from the beginning with the founding of the Left Opposition — thirty years ago.
The Fourth International of today bases itself on the analysis of the Left Opposition, whose essential charge against the Stalinist degeneration included the rehabilitation of the bourgeois family. It is increasingly realised that the struggle for women’s liberation can only mean the revolutionary movement joining the working-class struggle, and that the struggle for women’s liberation must be situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat.
¹ See Tessa van Gelderen’s article, p. 6.