THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY is not claiming to have womens' liberation all neatly wrapped up in a parcel with revolutionary socialism ready to be delivered on the doorstep of the ruling class. We do aspire to build a party that can make the unity of the class struggle and women's liberation a fact, a party that can one day be at the forefront of the class struggle with a clear revolutionary perspective for getting rid of capitalism and achieving workers' power. We want to encourage other women to join us and to play an equal (not a separate) part in that struggle.
We do not accept the divisions between men and women that have been built into the labour movement by men's selfishness and shortsightedness and by bureaucratic manipulation from above. But we do not accept, either, the divisions that many feminists would insist on, setting working-class men and women against one another and letting the class struggle grow weaker as a result.
We believe that the Marxist explanation of the origins of class society and women's liberation is the key to understanding the position of women, but we do not regard this as a purely academic argument. As Marx said, 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.'
The revolutionary socialist tradition holds out a glimpse of how the world can be changed for the better, in the vision of the few years following the Russian Revolution of 1917 before Stalinism took over.
We do not believe that feminism, in the sense of a struggle of women against men, holds out any such hope of changing things.