MANY PEOPLE think of feminism as an alternative to revolutionary socialism. Because there is no organised feminist movement, no feminist programme, it is often hard to tell what women mean when they call themselves feminist. The word may simply mean that a person (woman or man) is committed to the cause of women's liberation--and in that sense, as I have been arguing in this pamphlet, it is fully compatible with revolutionary socialism.
But there has been, ever since the nineteenth century, a feminism that is definitely incompatible with revolutionary socialism; indeed that is an obstacle to class struggle and the participation of women in the socialist movement. This kind of feminism centres on the view that all men are enemies of women, including working-class men-- perhaps particularly working-class men, as middle-class feminists seem a lot readier to denounce printers and miners for their sexist ways than Tory politicians or captains of industry. Rather than trying to change the outlook of working-class men, get them to support women in practice, and perhaps change their ideas more radically too, such feminists simply say that there can be no common cause of men and women in class struggle. In the early 1980s, this view became widespread among feminists in Britain.
Yet it is remarkable how many women who thought of themselves as feminists found themselves supporting the miners' strike in 1984-85, simply because miners' wives were leading the way and a defeat for the Thatcher government seemed like a good idea for feminists as well as socialists. Many feminists' ideas are vague rather than clear-cut, and they do not accept all the consequences of a struggle 'against men'. Many think of themselves as 'socialist feminists', but without accepting the revolutionary tradition.
Most feminists are not in the least like the lesbian separatists pictured by the media. Most lesbians are not like that either, since being attracted to other women and wanting to live together doesn't necessarily mean lesbians have to be extreme feminists in their political opinions. The opinion-formers in our society want to create a picture of a threat that is at once political and sexual, and they play on people's prejudices to create it.
But there is often among feminists a preoccupation with the personal and the trivial--the way people (especially other women, as it happens) live, dress and talk. In the 1960s, the slogan 'the personal is political' was a good one, because for decades many questions crucial to women in the socialist movement had been dismissed as private matters. But more recently it has become an excuse for ignoring political arguments about class struggle because only the personal is seen as political. The point is that the way most people live, dress or talk can't be changed by moralising argument, but only by changing the world around us, by working for socialist revolution; and if that is achieved, people will choose new ways of living, dressing, talking (and loving) without instruction.
It is often considered essential to feminism to believe that women can only organise and fight separately from men. Because men have for so long excluded women from most organisations and struggles in the labour movement, women argue that they can no longer take part in organisations with men, who will only try to dominate them in the same old way. There is a problem about men's way of running the labour movement without women, but it cannot be fought by separatism, because this method avoids confronting men and insisting that they give way on their 'own' ground.
The question of women's organisation is above all a tactical one. During the miners' strike, for example, women were usually mobilised into support of the strike by setting up a women's committee associated with a pit or village--like the Women's Auxiliaries often set up in the American strikes and occupations of the 1930s. But in many areas women also sat on the strike committee, which was even more valuable because they were gaining admission to the sort of discussions and decisions from which they had previously been excluded. Both of these were good tactics: what is wrong is to insist that women can only or must always organise separately.
Perhaps there could be a women's movement which, while not feminist in the sense of being against all men, could be a separate but equal part of the class struggle? This depends on what kind of organisation you believe the working class needs so as to be able to fight effectively. In the end, the outcome of a revolutionary situation like that in Russia in 1917 (and many others that have not resulted in successful revolutions, like Spain in 1936 or France in 1968) depends on clear, decisive and often rapid action. A loose alliance of separate organisations with different ways of working cannot just suddenly jell into an effective revolutionary force at the eleventh hour; it is necessary, from long before a revolutionary situation arrives, to build an effective revolutionary party with a mass membership. Therefore, it is necessary to make sure that women become an important and recognised force in any such organisation, not outside it.
Our outlook on workers' organisation is, therefore, different from that of the Labour Party. Large numbers of women who have been active in the women's movement are now being drawn into the Labour Party (and to a lesser extent the wing of the Communist Party that is closest to the Labour Party). Why do we as revolutionary socialists refuse to join the Labour party, where, it is often said, we would have the chance to influence more people and even affect policies at the parliamentary level?
We are not in the Labour Party because we do not believe that society can be changed by a series of gradual steps in the right direction. The people who hold power in our society will not be removed except by the opposite power, the working class. Parliament does not have real power to transform society: as soon as it starts treading on the toes of big business it is brought back into line. The hope that the position of women in our society can be radically improved by parliamentary action is an illusion. Even the legislation that we do have, the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts, have been ineffective in themselves: the only thing that gave the Equal Pay Act some teeth in the mid-1970s was that women in hundreds of workplaces took action to see that they got what it promised.
All feminist calls for reform assume that the state is a neutral force which can redress the balance between men and women by action from above. But the state is not neutral, even under a Labour government, and the inequality of men and women is too deeply rooted in our system of society, the capitalist system, to be removed by a few reforms from above.
In addition to this, most reforms that feminists in and around the Labour Party have suggested in recent years have proposed to sacrifice the interests of the working class as a whole to the supposed benefit of women. Such is the 'feminist incomes policy' which, they claim, would hold men's wages down and allow women's to rise. But the experience of all incomes policies shows that while they can hold 36 wages down, they cannot make employers redistribute the difference to lower paid workers. Incomes policies have in practice weakened lower-paid workers, such as the council manual workers who were made an example during Labour's incomes policies of the late 1970s even though they were among the lowest paid.
Another feminist proposal, that the state should guarantee an adequate income to housewives and mothers whether they stay at home or go out to work, sounds like a good idea for making women financially independent, but could well have the effect of driving women out of the labour force in large numbers. The arguments for sacking women first when there are to be redundancies would be overwhelming, and many women would prefer to give up the unequal struggle for jobs and go back to being isolated in the home. Reforms like this, that tinker with the system without attacking the root of the problem, capitalism itself, could do a lot more harm than good for women.
At the local level, many feminists have been involved in left-wing Labour councils, and see their aim as being to improve life for women in their area. This has really amounted to two things. On the one hand, some small amounts of money have been given to voluntary organisations and women's groups of various kinds, about which the media have made a quite disproportionate fuss, usually based on outright misinformation. On the other hand, women's officers and committees have been set up within the councils' own administration, often involving new posts at senior executive level to prove that women's equality is being 'taken seriously', with salaries in the #15,000-#20,000 bracket even though the total amounts are still a drop in the bucket of council finances.
Despite the many hostile comments from the press and television on these 'socialist republics' or 'parish communes', the fact is that they are quite unable to improve life for the majority of women who live in these usually poor inner city areas. Central government (already under Labour in the late 1970s, but increasingly so under the Tories) has been starving these councils of the resources needed to keep essential facilities such as housing, transport and jobs at an adequate level, let alone improve them and supply other things that women need such as nurseries, out-of-school play facilities for children and refuges for battered wives.
What makes it worse is that the measures taken by even the most well-intentioned Labour councils are handed down from above and on their terms. Some Labour councils provide special facilities for women's trade union committees, while keeping shop stewards' meetings to an absolute minimum; others finance research into the changing position of women in the labour market, but denounce council typists who are trying to prevent the loss of jobs by themselves controlling the introduction of new office technology.
In circumstances like these, the news that a Women's Adviser has been appointed at #20,000 a year or that women councillors use official cars to collect their children from school because they are too busy with committee meetings to wait in long bus queues like other mothers, is bound to infuriate many working-class women. Women reformers in local government have sadly often widened the gap that separates them from the women they claim to represent.