Tony Cliff's Nightmare – Feminism

The IMG and SWP Debated the Struggle for Women's Liberation

The SWP closed Women’s Voice at its 1982 conference. Tony Cliff had decided the paper was becoming a road out of the party: women were developing autonomous politics that competed with, rather than fed, the revolutionary project as he conceived it. The vote was consistent. It followed from a theoretical position he had held throughout the preceding decade, and which Valerie Coulas had named, precisely, in the pages of International a year earlier: “Tony Cliff’s Nightmare is Feminism.”

The IMG’s magazine was right. And the nightmare was his, not theirs.

Coulas’s November 1981 article argued that Cliff’s engagement with the Marxism-feminism debate “distorts the spirit of feminism” and fails to grasp its “political dynamics”. The polemic holds up. Not because every detail is correct — some of the historical claims about Zetkin require qualification — but because the structural charge is accurate. Cliff’s position represented orthodox economism dressed up as socialist principle, and the closure of Women’s Voice was not a bureaucratic accident. It was the logical conclusion of the theory.

This matters now. [See our: ‘Terrain of Survival’ series] The earlier instalments in this series have examined how working-class women are being recruited by the far right on the terrain of daily life: purchasing power, healthcare access, childcare costs, the withdrawal of domestic violence services. The argument of the series is that life-making is class struggle, that social reproduction is a site of political contest. Cliff’s framework foreclosed that analysis before it could begin. The IMG’s framework, derived from the Fourth International’s 1979 World Congress, opened it.

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Cliff’s formulation was, on its surface, unimpeachable: “the working class cannot be won to socialism unless women are simultaneously won to socialism.” Read that sentence twice. The winning of women to socialism is the goal. Feminism, autonomous feminist organisation, the specific demands of the women’s liberation movement: these are at best instruments, at worst obstacles.

Coulas called this a ‘conscious dichotomy’. It is a better description than it might initially appear. There is a forced choice embedded in the logic: between building socialist politics among women, and supporting the development of an autonomous women’s movement with its own dynamic, its own demands, its own capacity to embarrass the party. Cliff chose the former. Every subsequent decision followed from that choice.

Lindsey German, writing in Socialist Review in September 1979 and expressing the SWP’s framework with greater clarity than Cliff sometimes managed, put the position in its starkest form: “the fundamental division is not between the sexes, but between those who produced the wealth in society and those who rob them of it.” [See: Segal’s account in Beyond the Fragments] There it is. Women’s oppression is real, but it is a function of class exploitation. The struggle against it is the class struggle. No remainder. No autonomous structure. No movement that might develop a politics the party cannot control.

The SWP’s Joan Smith, writing in International‘s 1979 debate section, was more careful than German. She acknowledged the party had been ‘backward’ around 1964. She described a reciprocal relationship in which “the party helps build the women’s movement, and the women’s movement helps build the party.” She did not advocate a separate women’s party. She argued for independent women’s organisation in alignment with revolutionary politics. Three years later, that organisation was voted out of existence.

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Lynne Segal, contributing to the same debate, saw what Smith couldn’t quite say. The SWP had not grasped, she argued, “the dynamic of the women’s liberation movement.” In her work that followed — including Beyond the Fragments, co-written with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright — Segal pushed the analytical problem further. The division of labour in the home is not only a mechanism for reproducing capitalism’s labour force. It is also a power relationship between men and women. These are not the same proposition, however much they overlap, and treating them as identical produces not just theoretical error but practical consequences: a party where the structures of women’s oppression are reproduced internally, because the theory offers no tools for identifying them.

The closure of Women’s Voice is one kind of consequence. The SWP’s crisis of 2013, when the apparatus applied ‘democratic centralism’ to allegations of rape, is another.

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The Fourth International’s 1979 World Congress resolution, ‘Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation’, had already consolidated the alternative. The autonomous women’s movement was strategically necessary: not a useful auxiliary, not a recruiting ground, not a temporary formation until women could be brought into the party proper. Necessary. The resolution argued that women’s oppression has structural dimensions that class struggle, defined elsewhere and led by others, cannot address. The struggle for women’s liberation must be pursued autonomously and simultaneously, from the outset.

This is the position the IMG was defending in International. Coulas’s polemic against Cliff expressed it; the debate with Smith and German developed it. What the FI resolution gave these arguments was a theoretical foundation that survived the pressures of the moment: the bureaucratic reflex that wanted women’s liberation folded neatly into the next paper sale, the next industrial dispute, the next conference vote.

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Coulas noted Cliff’s reference to Clara Zetkin as evidence of “ignorance of relevant historical tradition.” She was right to flag it. Cliff’s invocation of Zetkin to argue against autonomous feminist formations was a selective reading; the actual history of the German Communist Party’s work among women in the 1920s is more complicated than the SWP’s account allowed, and Zetkin’s own political trajectory after 1914 does not straightforwardly support the conclusions Cliff drew from it.

But the more important failure was theoretical. Cliff saw feminism as his nightmare because an autonomous women’s movement generates demands, energies, and organisational forms that cannot be subordinated to the party’s requirements. He was right about that. He drew the wrong conclusion. An autonomous women’s movement is not a threat to revolutionary politics; it is a condition of them.

The right understands this now, from the other direction. The Rassemblement National recruits working-class women on childcare costs and healthcare closures. Counterfire produces content treating gender politics as liberal distraction. The argument Coulas was making in 1981 is not settled history. It is the argument the left is still losing.

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The FI’s 1979 resolution, ‘Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation’, is the essential starting point for understanding what the IMG was defending in these debates.
This article was updated in May 2026 to add hyperlinks and subedited for length.