International Socialism 158 and 159 now out

The latest issues of International Socialism is now out and also online - see here for more details and full contents, but highlights of issue 158 include Shirin Hirsch on Enoch Powell, Alex Callinicos on Karl Marx, Judy Cox on the fight for women's suffrage, Joseph Choonara on 'the political economy of a long depression', and material relating to 1968 on the fiftieth anniversary of 'the fire last time'...and highlights of issue 159 include a discussion of youth crime, class and capitalism, the recent UCU strikes, Prague 1968 among much else...

The secret history of Monopoly

The capitalist board game's left wing origins

International Socialism # 144 out now

The latest issue of International Socialism journal, a quarterly journal of Marxist theory, is out now - highlights include critical discussions of Lahs Lih's work on Lenin, Lise Vogel's work on women's liberation, Vivek Chibber's work on the Subaltern Studies school, plus articles on Scotland, South Africa, Ukraine, imperialism and global warming.  There is also an online only article on 'The birth of a new generation under tear gas: the umbrella movement in Hong Kong' by Vincent Sung, which is most timely and brings out the tensions and how that movement is at something of a crossroads.  To subscribe to the ISJ, see here.

Reflections on HM conference 2013

Over the weekend I attended Historical Materialism conference in London, which was enjoyable enough (the chance to meet friends old and new, and pick up some of the latest Marxist literature - for example the new issue of Revolutionary History journal) but it was not - as ever - without its own internal contradictions. Back in 2008, five years ago, at the start of the economic crisis, I wrote a short piece on Histomat reflecting on that year's HM conference, noting it was an 'essentially academic Marxist affair'. It is this which largely explains its contradictory nature, for the latest academic fads and fashions as often clash with classical Marxist theory as add anything useful or valuable to it. Moreover, those latest academic fads and fashions are sometimes presented and discussed in a language which is so obtuse as to make it impossible for those without PhDs (and even many of those with PhDs) to understand. One can only have sympathy with Selma James, who noted after hearing three papers on the tensions between Marxism and postcolonial theory, 'I can understand Marx, but I have a problem understanding Marxists'.

 This will not be a full report of this years conference - I was only there over the weekend as I said, not the full four days - but I thought I may as well write up some brief impressions nonetheless. On the plus side, it was as big as ever (some 880 paid attendees apparently) and some of the sessions at HM one finds oneself in are genuinely stimulating and enlightening affairs, where - though often the time for discussion is necessarily limited - one has a chance to hear from those doing extremely important and worthwhile work both theoretically and practically. On the Sunday for example, I attended a session hosted by the Institute of Race Relations which included listening to a recording of a fascinating interview with the veteran anti-racist A Sivanandan as well as others from IRR talking about the dangerous and violent rise of racism and fascism across Europe, and the importance of for example, the Left standing in solidarity with, for example, the Roma people and their 'community of resistance'. This was then followed by an opportunity to hear Heide Gerstenberger, Robin Blackburn and Priyamvada Gopal on 'free labour and wage slavery', a great discussion which ranged from the meaning of freedom in both Marx's writings and in those ex-slaves in Jamaica who rose against British colonial dictatorship at Morant Bay in 1865.

 As well as such themes as 'race and capital' illustrated above, the overall theme of this years conference was 'the making of the world working class', given it was both the 75th anniversary of CLR James's classic history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins as well as the fiftieth anniversary of EP Thompson's classic account of the revolutionary history of the resistance to capitalist industrialisation, The Making of the English Working Class. And many of the papers addressed themselves to thinking about either James, Thompson or the making and re-making of the international working class today. However - and here was for me perhaps the key contradiction about this years HM conference - the ideas about the centrality of the working class as the agency that will fundamentally change the world through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism - ideas that were, more or less, at the heart of the intellectual project of both CLR James and EP Thompson themselves - have rarely been more unfashionable than they are currently, certainly among academics and to a large extent in the anti-capitalist movement at large. This is despite the fact that the Occupy movement's slogan about the 99% against the 1% spoke precisely to a wider popular feeling of class - of 'us' and 'them' - in society at large amidst austerity and welfare cuts.

The sheer unfashionable nature about thinking about class struggle in a classical Marxist sense in many academic and activist circles manifested itself at even HM conference - and came through strongly in the final plenary session, 'Labour, Race and Gender in the Making of the World Working Class', provoking almost an 'existential crisis' feeling about Marxism right at the end - which is surely a bit of an odd feeling for one to leave an ostensibly 'Marxist' conference with. This was not because of anything said by two of the three final plenary speakers. S'bu Zikode from the shack dwellers' social movement in South Africa talked movingly of the lost dream of Nelson Mandela amidst the brutality of post-apartheid neo-liberal capitalist South Africa - as he put it 'freedom has been privatised and we have a long way to go to get democracy'. The American labour historian David Roediger for his part built on WEB Du Bois's classic Black Reconstruction to give us a clear sense of the 'magnificent drama' involved in 'the self-emancipation of U.S. slaves' and how their victory gave confidence to and fed into other struggles for liberation among other oppressed groups in American society, above all women and their struggle for the vote.

The problematic nature of this years HM conference for me was epitomised by the paper of the third plenary speaker, Abbie Bakan, entitled 'When Class meets Race and Gender: Reflections on Method'. Given her years of activism as a revolutionary socialist and the fact she has written important works in the past on subjects ranging from class struggles in Jamaica to Marilyn Monroe, she was certainly an important enough figure to justify her place on the panel at the closing session of a conference like HM. I guess maybe in part I was just expecting too much from her. It was not so much anything she said in her main paper that was particularly that problematic, though she seemed to be saying that the traditional class analysis of Marxists needed revision as it was 'sociological' to focus on waged work. It was more what she did not say that was problematic. Indeed, the general thrust of her paper seemed to be arguing for 'inter-sectionality' and left one vaguely wondering how someone can speak at a Marxist conference for 20 minutes on the subject of race, class and gender and not at least quickly discuss how class for Marxists is related to exploitation, while race and gender are related to oppression - and therefore there is a material interest among the working class to unite collectively to resist that exploitation - and in the process of uniting there is a need for workers to link together in solidarity, to challenge the ideas of the ruling class that try to divide us according to oppression - racism, sexism, homophobia etc etc if they are going to be victorious. Bakan talked of how capital divides us along the lines of 'race, class and gender' without explaining how only the working class - because it is as Marx put it, a 'universal class' - has a clear interest in this division of our common humanity being overcome, and more importantly, because of its strategic location as the central creator of profits and wealth for the capitalist class, also happens to be a collective group in society with the collective power to bring the whole system to a stop. As Rosa Luxemburg famously put it, 'where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken'.

 Abbie Bakan's 'epistomologies of ignorance'

In the discussion, Bakan was challenged from many sides and many angles. One black guy noted that he kind of liked that Bakan had used the work of Jamaican scholar Charles Mills, but wondered why she needed to use his talk about 'epistomologies of ignorance' to discuss racism for example. It was a good point - as the guy seemed to be suggesting, Karl Marx had talked clearly and in language people could understand about how 'the ruling ideas of society are those of the ruling class' and that these ideas were necessarily therefore mythological, long before Mills's writing today. More critically, one SWP member challenged Bakan on her failure to identify class struggle as the key thing that can potentially unite all the oppressed groups into a common struggle through giving them a clear sense of their own power, and it was Bakan's response to this point that personally left me in a state of almost disbelief.

At this point, I should say that until earlier this year Abbie Bakan was for many years a leading member of the International Socialist Tendency, founded by Tony Cliff, of which as a member of the SWP I am also a member. I was aware that Bakan had already begun to move away from that tradition's ideas, particularly with respect to how that tradition understands the question of Marxism and women's liberation, so up to now I was not surprised by anything Bakan had said in her paper, though I thought she might have still alluded in some sense to how class was different from race and gender at least somewhere in the twenty minutes allotted to her. However, I was still shocked at how Bakan responded to criticism of her essentially inter-sectional analysis from a more classical Marxist perspective. I did not note down everything she said, so some of this is from memory - hopefully at some point if the debate was filmed a more accurate account of the debate may emerge - but these are some of the general points she made (do not take them as absolutely accurate quotes, but am trying to convey the general gist of Bakan's argument).

 1. 'I had been trained in a white, male, masculine, Eurocentric version of Marxism, and so as a woman I had to do additional reading and work to make sense of things'. 

 Now the idea that because Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky were 'white', male and European intellectuals that Marxism is somehow incapable of explaining the oppression of women or people of colour is not a new one but a staple of feminist and black nationalist theory for decades. I think however Bakan here was trying to suggest that the particular tradition in which she was trained as a Marxist - the International Socialist tradition - trained her in a Eurocentric and masculinist reading of Marxism, which is a slightly new twist on an old familiar story. Of course before the rise of 'second wave feminism' in the 1970s, the IS tradition did not write a great deal on women's liberation, and no doubt women like Bakan had to do a lot of additional reading to catch up and engage with the new movement as Marxists in the 1970s. But isn't this what any and every Marxist has to do when faced with a new movement that emerges - or any new situation more generally - in order to relate to it effectively? Blaming the paucity of existing theorising on such a question is not a Marxist way of thinking - rather one has to return to the Marxist classics and try to apply them to make sense of a new situtation. This is surely what the likes of Abbie Bakan but also others, such as Lindsey German and of course Tony Cliff himself, did during the 1970s and afterwards as IS members in order to make sense of the relationship between 'sex, class and socialism', to quote Lindsey German's fine book on this question.

 2. 'I can't find anything about the struggle at the point of production in Marx himself'. Bakan noted that Marx had talked of production and the labour process in Capital, but seemed to be suggesting that nowhere did Marx stress the centrality of the class struggle at the point of production.

 3. 'The Communist International talked of political, social and economic resistance to capital' [ie. not about working class struggle]. Bakan here alluded to the work of John Riddell and his translations of the debates of the Communist International.

 4. 'I still dream of a government of workers' councils, but I have no prescription for how to get from here to there'.

 These three points can essentially be taken together - and nos. two and three of her argument certainly surprised even me. Karl Marx once said that 'the working class is revolutionary or it is nothing'. Marx meant that the working class was a revolutionary class. For Bakan, it seems that because the working class is not revolutionary now, it is therefore nothing now. Yet as Lenin noted, the Prussian Minister for Internal Affairs, Herr von Puttkammer, was right when he coined the famous phrase 'In every strike there lurks the hydra of revolution'. Now of course, strikes at the point of production are not the only way workers can be revolutionary or even just wage class struggle, but they are and remain the central way workers do this. No wonder if you move away from this that you can't connect how to move from the situation now - with a very low level of class struggle - with the future government of workers' councils every Marxist hopes for.

 As for Bakan's comment on the Communist International, I am still puzzled by what she meant here (clarification from anyone welcome), but needless to say it did not take ten seconds of a google search to find a quote like this, from a 'Resolution of the Second World Congress': ‘The Communist International decisively rejects the view that the proletariat can achieve its revolution without having an independent political party of its own. Every class struggle is a political struggle. The goal of this struggle, which is inevitably transformed into civil war, is the conquest of political power. Political power cannot be seized, organised and operated, except through a political party.’ Now maybe this is an old translation, and John Riddell's sterling work of translating Communist International documents mean this resolution actually did not talk of 'the proletariat' but 'the people', and not 'class struggle' but 'resistance', but somehow a tiny part of me  doubts it.

In conclusion, Abbie Bakan once wrote a nice little pamphlet about 'the great lie' that Stalinist Russia was a socialist country. She alluded in her talk to her learning from the IS tradition about how Russia was state capitalist, or as she put it, how 'capitalism comes in many forms'. Yet it seemed to me that Bakan was herself guilty of perpetuating a 'little lie' in her talk at HM conference in 2013 - namely that when she talked of the need to update our theoretical understanding about race and gender that she was concerned with a move from what she called 'analogue Marxism to digital Marxism'. Rather, it seemed to me she was engaged in a move away from classical Marxism towards something else (perhaps 'socialist feminism', though she did not use such a label to describe herself in her talk at HM). The audience at HM in the final plenary was noticeably quite young, and Bakan's talk went down well among a significant section of it. One speaker from the floor who was well received by the audience at HM was a young black guy who began by saying that 'he liked Marx, but did not call himself a Marxist'. Such a position given what he went on to say is actually quite honest and to be commended in a sense - and one can only feel that Bakan should face up to the logic of what she was arguing and admit the same, rather than maintain the pretence that she is somehow still a 'Marxist' when it is clear how far she has moved theoretically.

I do not mean to make this point as a personal attack on Bakan herself - if people want to move away from Marxism then that is their individual choice - though the fact that she has moved so far in less than a year after leaving the IS tendency does raise questions about whether she will even want to appear at a conference such as HM in future years. Yet that given she has moved so far already - and was still invited to address the final plenary at HM conference - does raise even more significant questions about HM itself, and those who organise it. At a time when class struggle is low it is not surprising that many Marxists like Bakan are looking around for short cuts to socialism that do not involve talking about the central and revolutionary role of the working class. Many in the final plenary talked of the disconnect between 'the Left' and various movements and struggles taking place. It is absolutely true that such a disconnect exists and the revolutionary Left is tiny internationally, way too tiny to significantly influence even great class struggles such as those taking place in Egypt and Greece. However, this problem will not be solved one iota - in fact it will be deepened and widened immeasurably - if Marxists, including the Marxists who organise HM conference, choose to fundamentally orientate themselves around what passes for political radicalism in academia instead of the needs, concerns and struggles of the working class.

Tony Cliff on the working class and the oppressed

WHY DID Karl Marx put the emphasis on the working class? It was not because the working class was large in numbers. When Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, the only two countries where the industrial revolution was complete were England and Belgium.

Internationally the working class was tiny. Today there are more workers in South Korea than there were in the entire world in Marx’s time. Even today the working class does not make up the majority of humanity. The majority of the world’s population are peasants.

He chose the working class because the working class is the subject of history, because it is in a collective situation. It is not a collection of people but a collective of people. There is all the difference in the world between these two.

In Russia, for example, the people who really suffered most before 1917 were not the workers. The 40,000 workers in the Putilov armaments factory in Petrograd were on top wages, yet they formed the citadel of Bolshevism. The workers were more cultured than the peasants. Nearly 80 percent of them could read and write.

The main point then was not suffering or deprivation, but the fact that the working class was a collective.

It was for this reason that Marx spoke about the working class as a collective class, as a universal class. It is the class that in emancipating itself emancipates humanity, because where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they have to be broken.

When you look to the oppressed there is a problem: there are far more oppressed people in the world than there are workers. There are thousands of millions of oppressed women. There are a massive number of oppressed blacks and Asians, there are millions of oppressed gays, there are millions of oppressed Jews. The numbers are absolutely massive.

Are they a collective? No. The oppressed do not join forces automatically. The idea of a rainbow alliance of the oppressed wouldn’t stand the test of five minutes of struggle.

It is not true that if you are gay you automatically support blacks, that if you are black you automatically support gays, or if you are gay you automatically support Jews.

If anyone is in any doubt, let us look at the reality. For instance it is simply not true that Jews in Nazi Germany were attacked only by heterosexuals. Among the worst anti-semites were the Nazi gays.

Why? Because to be a homosexual you were inferior in Nazi terms. But if you had a leather jacket, leather boots and a swastika, compared to a Jew or compared to a woman you didn’t feel inferior at all, you felt superior...

Read the rest of the article, the transcript of a talk Tony Cliff gave at Marxism 1987 on 'The working class and the oppressed' here. You can also hear Cliff give another lecture on this topic in his inimitable style in 1994 here

International Socialism # 138 out now

 The full contents are well worth a browse and are available here, but highlights at first glance include Sheila McGregor on 'Marxism and women's oppression today', which includes a defence of Engels's writings on this issue, and a series of essays on the state of the class struggles in Europe, including pieces by Catarina Príncipe on Portugal and Thanasis Kampagianni on Greece.  There are also a host of other pieces, including a discussion between Henry Bernstein and Joseph Choonara about agriculture, class and capitalism, and a kind of debate between Ian Birchall and John Rose about Lenin, Paul Levi and revolutionary strategy and tactics.  There is also a review of Donny Gluckstein's A People's History of the Second World War, a work which has already stirred up considerable debate online elsewhere.

Edited to add: The ISJ during the 1980s carried a number of interesting pieces on Thatcher - for example,  Sue Clegg on 'Thatcher and the Welfare State', while for discussions of 'Thatcherism', see Alex Callinicos.

International Women's Day Greetings

 

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do; they will make their own practice and their corresponding public opinion about the practice of each individual – and that will be the end of it.
Frederick Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) 


Edited to add: Sally Campbell on Engels's path-breaking writings on women's liberation

On Marxism and 'male privilege'

In many of the discussions currently underway between Marxists and feminists about the struggle for women's liberation - for a recent useful overview of some of these see this piece by Judith Orr - there is a sense that the debates that took place in the 1970s and 1980s at the time of the mass Women's Liberation Movement itself are so completely outdated as to be irrelevant - and so when someone like Richard Seymour for example now talks of 'male privilege' and the 'ostensible compensations of "maleness" ... an iteration at the level of ideology of various realities – the wage gap, male household dominance, the orientation of mass culture toward encouraging women to be "man-pleasing", and so on' there is a sense that these arguments - fashionable today in the radical left milieu - are all somehow completely new. Certainly Seymour does little to disabuse readers of this idea by mentioning any past writing or theorising on this question.

This is combined with a wider argument - taking place internationally - that somehow 'socialists need feminism' in the twenty-first century to both adequately understand and challenge women's oppression, by incorporating 'patriarchy theory' into Marxist theory (for example, if one wishes, again see Seymour). Again, these are not particularly new arguments, but build on a wider historic theoretical tradition of 'socialist feminism' and 'Marxist feminism' dating back to the 1970s. In the US, for example, one leading Marxist - Sharon Smith of the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) has made the case for an adaptation of classical Marxist theory in the direction of 'socialist feminism', arguing that 'some in our own tradition, the International Socialist tradition ... fell into a [class] reductionist approach to women's liberation a few decades ago. And I would also argue that our own organization has borne the stamp of this training on a couple of key theoretical points, which I want to briefly summarize.' It is worth quoting Smith's argument at length:

 'First, what is reductionism? In its purest form, reductionism is the notion that the class struggle will resolve the problem of sexism on its own, by revealing true class interests, as opposed to false consciousness. So this approach "reduces" issues of oppression to an issue of class. It's also usually accompanied by a reiteration of the objective class interests of men in doing away with women's oppression - without taking on the harder question: How do we confront sexism inside the working class? Now, obviously this crude approach does not describe the IS tradition, which certainly since the 1960s women's liberation movement has taken women's liberation seriously as central to the struggle for socialism. 

 However, I would argue that there was an adaptation in the direction of reductionism, and a tendency to minimize the oppression experienced by working-class women, which led to a mistaken theoretical litmus test involving the question of whether working class men "benefit" from women's oppression. I also want to make it clear here that I am not simply finger-pointing here, since, to a lesser degree, we in the ISO adopted a similar approach.

There was a set of articles and a debate in the mid-1980s in a series of articles in the International Socialism Journal involving some of the key leaders of the Socialist Workers Party-Britain, which began to take up the issues I just described. I can't summarize the entire debate, but I can just lay out some of the key points. Let's start with a 1984 article titled 'Women's Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism' by Chris Harman, a leading member of the SWP (I want to make clear that Chris Harman was one of the greatest Marxists of his time, who played a key role in training many of us in the ISO, so the issue I am about to describe represents a small, if significant, detraction from his otherwise enormous contribution to Marxism). In the article, Harman argues:

''In fact, however, the benefits working class men get from the oppression of women are marginal indeed...The benefits really come down to the question of housework. The question becomes the extent to which working class men benefit from women's unpaid labor. What the working class male gains directly in terms of labor from his wife can be roughly measured. It is the amount of labor he would have to exert if he had to clean and cook for himself. This could not be more than an hour or two a day - a burden for a woman who has to do this work for two people after a day's paid labor, but not a huge gain for the male worker.''

 It is worth noting that Harman's comments above were describing the "marginal" benefits men experienced without children adding to women's burden within the household. Another British socialist, John Molyneux, responded to Harman's argument, saying that male benefits are more than marginal: "Harman tells us that this is 'a burden for the woman who has to do this work for two people after a day's paid labor,' so why is it not an important gain for the [male] worker not to have to do it?" 

Molyneux's arguments drew a sharp response from SWP Central Committee members Lindsey German and Sheila McGregor, and Molyneux replied equally sharply. The debate did not end until 1986. Lindsey German made a point of arguing, "[T]he differences and advantages that men have are by no means massive; nor are they even the substantial benefits that John claims. So there is no material basis for men being 'bought off' by these advantages." 

Sheila McGregor argued as if Molyneux was well on the road to abandoning Marxism entirely: "If we are to have an adequate theory of women's oppression and how to fight it, we need to base ourselves on the Marxist tradition. John's position, that working-class men do benefit from women's oppression, is the first step toward departing from that tradition." 

Along the way in this debate, the position changed from what Harman had argued - that male benefits were "marginal" - - to the claim that working class men do not benefit from women's oppression at all - along with the claim that even the advantages men have over women inside the family are not "substantial." 

While it is true that capital is the primary beneficiary of women's oppression in the family and of all the sexist garbage used to reinforce women's second-class citizenship - and also that working-class men have an objective class interest in the liberation of women - I would also argue that posing the argument this way results in a tendency to minimize the severity of women's oppression and underplay the need to combat it inside the working class...

Furthermore, the truth is that feminism is a broad and multifaceted movement, with many different wings and many different theoretical foundations. To set up a straw figure of "feminism," based on its most bourgeois forms, knock it down, and then think our job is done intellectually does a disservice to the fight against women's oppression. There are important debates that have taken place between feminists that we have remained largely ignorant about that can be playing a role in advancing our understanding both of women's oppression and of Marxism itself.'

Of course, there are many strands of feminism - and of course socialists and Marxists should work alongside and indeed can learn much from the very best feminist activists, as well as engaging with theoretical debates among feminists.  It is the case that some writings by SWP authors over the years might today look unnecessarily critical of 'feminism' and even possibly partly 'class reductionist'. For example, in 1983 Tony Cliff wrote a book entitled Class Struggle and Women's Liberation, which was a book very much of its time - and written at speed in a highly polemical manner at a time when feminist ideas were in general moving to the right under the defeats of the wider working class movement under Thatcherism, and there was a danger these would pull the revolutionary Left to the right as well. Today, as mentioned above, when many feminists have recently made a turn towards anti-capitalism in the context of the wider ideological crisis in society, the tone of parts of Cliff's argument seem unnecessarily harsh.

However, Smith and others seem to have slightly caricatured the actual debate that took place in the ISJ between Harman, Molyneux, McGregor and German here. In actuality, 'the position' did not in a profound way 'change from what Harman had argued - that male benefits were "marginal" - to the claim that working class men do not benefit from women's oppression at all - along with the claim that even the advantages men have over women inside the family are not "substantial."' As Lindsey German put it in 1986, when summing up the debate,

 'it is therefore worth stating once again what is really involved in the argument about whether working-class men benefit from women’s oppression. It is not ... about whether working-class men have marginal advantages over their wives. After all, in my article on 'Theories of Patriarchy', I talk about the ‘marginal benefits’ which accrue to working-class men. Chris Harman quoted these comments favourably in his article 'Women’s liberation and revolutionary socialism'. Neither is the argument about whether women’s oppression exists ... Myself, Sheila [McGregor] and Chris Harman have all gone to some lengths to develop a theory of women’s oppression which roots it in class society and not in the individual relations between men and women. Indeed, it is here that we all part company with John [Molyneux]’s analysis, which all too often slips into the error of seeing women’s oppression as caused by the relations between individuals, rather than seeing those relations as in fact a product of the class nature of oppression. 

The real issue at debate, therefore, is not at all whether there are marginal advantages, but whether these are the cause of women’s oppression, and what the political consequences are in terms of organising men and women workers. Whatever advantages working-class men might have, their interests, just like those of working-class women, lie in joining the fight against women’s oppression. This is because the roots of women’s oppression lie in class society in general and capitalist society in particular. 

 The reason the argument between ourselves and John is a serious one is because the great divide between Marxists and patriarchy theorists is over precisely this point. Their ideas explain women’s oppression in terms of male domination – regardless of class or of the class nature of a particular society. We, in contrast, see it caused by the development of exploitation. The capitalist system rests on the exploitation of workers, both men and women. Women workers also suffer a specific oppression which is located in the continuing privatised reproduction of labour power. This points to a solution which involves collective working-class action. 

The point of our argument has been to show that patriarchy theorists – especially those who claimed to be materialists like Heidi Hartmann – were wrong. She and others like her claimed that the material benefits which men gained from the oppression of women were such that they wedded men not to fighting this oppressive system, but to its maintenance instead. The argument has been developed, in much less theoretical form, by many feminists inside the women’s movement. The argument, as I argued then, is complete nonsense. Even a cursory look at working-class history, or the pattern of class struggle, showed that. It was, however, this argument that led me to argue that you cannot talk about the ‘benefits’ accruing to men unless you talk about the system as a whole. Once you take the system as a whole it is much clearer that the real beneficiary of women’s oppression is the capitalist system itself... It is still the central point of the argument... 

The appeal of the argument that men benefit from women’s oppression is a real one, and highly understandable. It appears to reflect reality. Most of the time under capitalism people only see fragmentary and superficial aspects of the system. As a result, if you only go by immediate, empirical impressions, you get quite a confused idea about what the system as a whole is about. When it comes to the problem of locating the source of women’s oppression, it is all too easy simply to take surface appearances and mistake them for reality. So people who take a superficial view only notice that working-class women suffer disadvantages compared with men, and therefore conclude it is the working-class man’s ‘benefits’ which maintain oppression. This is what patriarchy theory does. That is why its talk about ‘male benefits’ can be so popular. It fits with the ‘common sense’ of those who live in capitalist society at a time when it is not being shaken to its root by massive class struggle. But that is precisely why Marxists have to disagree fundamentally with it. That is also why it is very important to argue strongly with those like John who are excellent Marxists when it comes to other issues, but who fall into the trap of feeling it is ‘unreasonable’ to dismiss such common sense arguments out of hand.

It is also worth noting German's point in 1986 that 'the argument about men benefiting continues to have some resonance precisely because we live in the sort of period that we do. It is a reflection of a low level of class struggle; of twelve years of deep recession throughout the world; and of the hold of deeply reactionary ideas about women which still exist. However, to explain why the argument is current now (in a way that it certainly wasn’t fifteen years ago) is not to justify or to concede to it. It does lead to reactionary conclusions, in the sense that it takes at least part of the blame away from the class enemy, and puts it at the door of individual men.'

Overall, then, discussion of 'patriarchy', 'male privilege' and 'maleness' (to use Seymour's term - in his writings on this question, he is essentially borrowing from critical race theory and discussions of 'whiteness' and mixing them with gender theory) does begin to take us away from revolutionary Marxism - both theoretically and practically - and therefore can be seen as a kind of 'theoretical litmus test'. Moreover, I am not convinced when Sharon Smith suggests that defending a classical Marxist understanding of women's oppression and so challenging the arguments about 'male benefits' in the manner Chris Harman, Sheila McGregor and Lindsey German did in the ISJ 'results in a tendency to minimize the severity of women's oppression and underplay the need to combat it inside the working class'. As McGregor noted, if taken to its logical conclusion, such an argument becomes one that suggests 'that revolutionary men are not capable of fighting for women’s liberation as they cannot be trusted to understand that the revolutionary struggle requires combating sexist divisions inside the working class. If men cannot be trusted to fight women’s oppression, then whites cannot be trusted to fight racial oppression, in fact no one can be trusted to fight oppression unless they themselves are oppressed. The only logical conclusion to such a position is that it is impossible to build a revolutionary party within the working class which will lead a systematic struggle against all oppression and further that the working class itself is incapable of transcending its own internal divisions.'

This is not to say that Smith is going as far as that - she is not - though by making a theoretical shift towards 'socialist feminism' and in the process unfairly accusing the British SWP of a historic tendency towards 'class reductionism', she is in danger of playing down the absolute centrality of class struggle to the fight for women's liberation. To quote Lindsey German in 1986 again:

 'All the evidence suggests, when one looks at society in the process of upheaval, that as the level of class struggle rises the tendency is for the differences between men and women to diminish ... the essence of class struggle is change – men and women changing the world and in the process changing themselves. This is the overwhelming factor which can lead to women’s liberation – not individual consciousness-raising or getting a slightly bigger share of the reformist cake for women. Nor is it just a pipe dream. Where the divisions of society are laid bare, we begin to see a very different picture from the present ‘common sense’ that men are the beneficiaries of women’s oppression. That was why the Russian revolution did more for the liberation of women than any other event in world history ... Nor is class unity merely a long-term factor. Even in the short term, men don’t benefit from nurseries being shut down, or from women getting lower pay or any of the other features of women’s oppression – because these are attacks not just on individual women but on the living standards of the whole working class. Given women’s role in social production over the last forty or fifty years, the role of class struggle, of collective class action in fighting women’s oppression, becomes even more central. The fight against women’s oppression cannot be divorced from the fight to end class society; therefore the fight against oppression and the fight against capitalist exploitation become one and the same.'

Edited to add: Judith Orr discusses 'privilege theory' and women's liberation in this weeks Socialist Worker

Suffragette Centenary - remembering Emily Wilding Davison

One hundred years ago, 4 June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison stepped on to the Epsom Racecourse to stop the Derby. An heroic, yet fatal, action, this was the single most important protest in a mass, and militant, campaign by the Suffragettes. Her cause, Votes for Women. A demand that would finally be met five years later in Britain in 1918. Today in the week of International Women's Day, Philosophy Football have marked the approaching anniversary of Emily's protest with a range of tailored centenary shirts - see for example here and here

Book Review: Unhitched by Richard Seymour

 

'As a member of the SWP, buying this book is probably an expellable offence', I joked to the genial old guy behind the counter in Housman's bookshop in London the other day as I handed over money for Unhitched by Richard Seymour - the proprieter of the Lenin's Tomb blog, which seems to be currently devoted to trying to drum up both sales of Unhitched and supporters of the 'SWP Opposition'. The Housmans assistant didn't get the joke, which served for me as a timely reminder that for probably about 99% of the Left in Britain, 'Lenin's Tomb' means, well, the Lenin's Tomb.

Anyway, onto Unhitched, which is really an enlargement on some of the arguments about the late Christopher Hitchens made in Seymour's The Liberal Defence of Murder. In many ways this little book is vintage Seymour doing what he does best - taking down pro-war liberal scum through remorseless detailed analysis of their bullshit. Those wanting a brief summary of the argument can go straight to this fine little piece Seymour wrote for the Guardian recently - Christopher Hitchens: from socialist to neocon. In general, Seymour's Unhitched does what it says on the tin - puts Christopher Hitchens on trial for his crimes - chief of which was acting as an apologist and propagandist for the American Empire. 'This is not a biography but an extended political essay' (pxxi), Seymour writes, indeed 'unabashedly a prosecution' in an imagined 'Trial of Christopher Hitchens' and 'if it must be conducted with the subject in absentia, as it were, it will not be carried out with less vim as a result'. (pxxii)

Its appearance is therefore to be welcomed by socialists and democrats more generally - if only to serve as a long overdue and hopefully permanent antidote to the pro-war liberal chorus of sycophancy and sentimentality that still surrounds and stifles any discussion of 'the Hitch'. How did that disgraced former MP Denis Macshane describe Hitchens after his death - oh yes, 'a cross between Voltaire and Orwell'...

As someone who has not read Hitchen's own autobiography, Hitch 22, I personally was hoping for something resembling a bit more of a biography than a long polemical essay when I bought Seymour's book. However, after reading Unhitched I am convinced that for all of Hitchens's brilliance and talent as a literary critic, he is simply not intellectually worthy enough of the attention and the effort necessary for someone to write a decent, critical biography of him - being essentially a charlatan, prone to plagiarism even when he was good, and happy to lie and caricature when he was bad. Hitchens's intellectual and political degeneration - so apparent post September 11th but as Seymour shows, with long roots in Hitchens's past work - perhaps reached its nadir with his writing about the death of Mark Daily, a young American who signed up to fight and die in the 'war on terror' after apparently being inspired by Hitchens's pro-war propaganda. As Seymour notes of Hitchen's subsequent 'maudlin display of his grief and catharsis, in some ways even more stomach lurching than his tribute to the World Trade Center', it 'climaxed in a puddle of self-pity and self-vindication', and Hitchens, having 'fantasised that the Bush administration was the equivalent of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification', was 'shocked to find that they were selling out his just war' and so now 'felt awful - so awful that he shed his tears, took the occasion to vindicate himself once again, and then moved on without ever having to really account for what he had done' (p98).

There is a lot in here - discussions of Hitchens on Orwell, Kipling, Paul Scott, Edward Said as well as the more political material one would expect - and there are plenty of references that readers will want to follow up on, whatever their own particular interests. There is some good historic discussion on previous cases of political shifts to the right from former revolutionaries - and there are some nice quotes from the likes of William Hazlitt and Isaac Deutscher on the situation post the French and Russian revolutions respectively, as former hopes were dashed by the rise of the likes of Napoleon and Stalin. Seymour even has space to aptly quote Norman Geras on the shift that followed the fading hopes that the movements of 1968 would break through:

In the advanced capitalist world from the mid-1960s a generation of intellectuals was radicalized and won for Marxism. Many of them were disappointed in the hopes they formed — some of these wild but let that pass — and for a good while now we have been witnessing a procession of erstwhile Marxists, a sizeable portion of the generational current they shared in creating, in the business of finding their way "out" and away. This exit is always presented, naturally, in the guise of an intellectual advance. Those of us unpersuaded of it cannot but remind its proponents of what they once knew but seem instantly to forget as they make their exit, namely, that the evolution of ideas has a social and material context.

Hitchens - in the late 1960s and early 1970s of course a member of the International Socialists - himself once revealingly told Decca Aitkenhead,

 'I've done better than I thought I would. I've made more money than I ever thought I would. I've got more readers than I ever thought I would, and more esteem' and now earns 'several hundred thousand dollars a year' – but Aitkenhead noted Hitchens claims his wealth hasn't influenced his opinions at all. Does he think wealth ever affects people's opinions? 'Well, yes, I'm a Marxist, after all.' So why would his own opinions be mysteriously immune to his bank balance? 'Well, because I can't trace any connection...'

Marx's key point about 'social being determining consciousness' is demonstrated well in the case of Christopher Hitchens, and he is well placed in his historical context by Seymour. Ultimately, this is not about one personality - but politics. If I have any criticism, it is that books like this - and the Verso Counterblasts series in general which aims 'to challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital' are essentially a negative critique. They raise a wider issue and a more interesting question which is not really discussed: what is the responsibility of intellectuals at a time of crisis, tumult and war? After all there is a great tradition of revolutionary intellectuals who have managed to play a positive role in the class struggle and revolutionary politics without being pulled to the right, even when confronted by defeats far greater than the defeats of the 1970s and 1980s.

 As well as this piece on the subject by Rick Kuhn, there is an interesting article in the latest issue of International Socialism on 'Hegemony and mass critical intellectuality' by Panagiotis Sotiris that discusses Marx, Gramsci, Bourdieu and Foucault, but concludes by rightly stressing the importance of political organisation for intellectuals.  

Above all we must think of radical left parties, political fronts and organisations as knowledge practices and laboratories of new forms of mass critical intellectuality. In a period of economic and political crisis but also of new possibilities to challenge capitalist rule, questions of political organisation gain new relevance. Thinking of organisation simply in terms of practical or communicative skills for mobilisation, or of electoral fronts and tactics is not enough. It would be better, in order to build today’s parties and united fronts, to revisit Gramsci’s (and Lenin’s) conception of the party as a democratic political and theoretical process that produces knowledge of the conjuncture, organic intellectuals, new worldviews, social and political alternatives, as a potential (counter)hegemonic apparatus. We need forms of organisation that not only enable coordination and networking, democratic discussion and effective campaigning, but also bring together different experiences, combine critical theory with the knowledge coming from the different sites of struggle, and produce both concrete analyses but also mass ideological practices and new forms of radical “common sense”.

This is I think right - but it is perhaps worth also remembering what Marx and Engels - traditional intellectuals themselves who made an immeasurable contribution to the theory and practice of independent revolutionary working class politics - also said on the matter of radical intellectuals and left-wing political parties in 1879:  

It is an unavoidable phenomenon, well established in the course of development, that people from the ruling class also join the proletariat and supply it with educated elements. This we have already clearly stated in the [Communist] Manifesto. Here, however, two remarks are to be made: 

First, such people, in order to be useful to the proletarian movement, must bring with them really educated elements. This, however, is not the case with the great majority of German bourgeois converts. Neither the Zukunft [fortnightly Berlin magazine] nor the Neue Gesellschaft [monthly Zurich periodical] has provided anything to advance the movement one step. They are completely deficient in real, factual, or theoretical material. Instead, there are efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them, and among whom one is more confused than the other, thanks to the process of decomposition in which German philosophy finds itself today. Instead of first studying the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of wanting to teach it. Hence, there are among those gentlemen as many viewpoints as there are heads; instead of clarifying anything, they only produce arrant confusion — fortunately, almost always only among themselves. Such educated elements, whose guiding principle is to teach what they have not learned, the party can well dispense with. 

 Second, when such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions. In so petty-bourgeois a country as Germany, such conceptions certainly have their justification, but only outside the Social-Democratic Labor party. If the gentlemen want to build a social-democratic petty-bourgeois party, they have a full right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, conclude agreements, etc., according to circumstances. But in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitates tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time.

In 1890, Engels even more forcefully warned of the potential danger of petty-bourgeois intellectuals for a revolutionary workers' organisation, noting such intellectuals should

 understand that their “academic education” — which in any case needs a basic, critical self-review — gives them no officer’s commission with a claim to a corresponding post in the party; that in our party everyone must serve in the ranks; that posts of responsibility in the party will be won not simply by literary talent and theoretical knowledge, even if both of these are present beyond a doubt, but that in addition what is required is a thorough familiarity with the conditions of the party struggle and seasoning in its forms, tested personnel reliability and sound character, and, finally, willing enlistment in the ranks of the fighters;—in short, that they, the “academically educated people,” have far more to learn from the workers, all in all, than the latter have to learn from them.

It is telling for example that Hitchens arrogantly apparently thought himself 'on the brink of becoming a "full-time organiser"' while he was in the International Socialists (p7)- as though his academic education at Oxford gave him some kind of 'officer’s commission with a claim to a corresponding post in the party'. Ian Birchall once drew a useful contrast comparing Christopher Hitchens with Paul Foot (who Seymour sadly doesn't mention in Unhitched), who did stay the course in the IS/SWP despite equal pressures from bourgeois society to break with his commitment to building revolutionary socialist organisation and embrace the mainstream:  

It is interesting to compare him with Paul Foot. Both had the same public school/Oxford training, and used the literary and oratorical skills they had acquired from it. But Foot had a solid core of principles which stayed with him to the very end - and which certainly made him less successful, in terms of official recognition, than he otherwise might have been. Hitchens, even in his left-wing phase, was always much more committed to his own career and to staying within the bounds of the mainstream. I knew him when he was a member of the Hornsey International Socialists in 1974, and I have to say I never liked or trusted him very much. That is only a personal reaction, of course, but I always felt the commitment to his personal advancement was greater than his commitment to the socialist cause.

As Seymour demonstrates in this volume, Christopher Hitchens was 'a petty bourgeois individualist who esteemed collectivism at least some of the time but never submitted to it himself ... the sociological basis, as it were, for his leftism was the radical intelligentsia'(pxi, xxii). But is Seymour himself really so different from Hitchens in this sense? Though of course one cannot doubt Seymour's principled commitment to the socialist cause, and his politics are no doubt better and sharper than those of even the young Hitchens, as someone whose base is in higher education as a PhD student, Seymour is clearly not immune from the gravitational pull of the 'radical intelligentsia' in the form of 'academic Marxism', to say nothing of the wider pull of petty-bourgeois thinking predominant in the 'blogosphere'/ social media which comes with being a high profile blogger who writes for the likes of The Guardian.  Indeed, arguably Seymour's recent post on Lenin's Tomb defending 'patriarchy' - critically debated here - is perhaps best seen as an example of what Marx and Engels were talking about in 1879 when they criticised 'efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them ... Instead of first studying the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of wanting to teach it'.

This is not meant as a personal or sectarian attack on Seymour - for no Marxist who works in the environment of higher education and/or who is an aspiring journalist is immune from such pressures. Still less is it meant as an attack on radical intellectuals per se. As Tony Cliff, founder of the SWP once wrote,

 The worst damage that can be done inside a revolutionary party is if there is an attack on the intellectuals inside the party, in the name of a proletarian attitude. As a matter of fact such an attack is not so much on the intellectuals but on the workers in the party. It is an insult to the workers as it assumes the workers are unable to grasp theory.

There of course has to be freedom inside a revolutionary party for members to have debates around, for example, theories of patriarchy. But equally, for socialists to take at face value the contemporary theories fashionable in the capitalist institutions of higher education, add one's own personal spin on them, and then pass what results off as the latest and highest form of thinking in 'Marxist theory' is precisely a method of thinking Marx and Engels (and later revolutionary Marxists) always warned against. To dismiss, for example, the relevance today of the debates that were had between Marxists and 'socialist feminists' during the 1970s and subsequently into the 1980s when the Women's Liberation Movement was at a much higher level of mass struggle than it has reached since, reveals a kind of intellectual elitism and arrogance that is most unworthy of any Marxist, let alone someone who is a member of the SWP.

Seymour wants his study of Hitchens to be seen as a kind of 'cautionary tale' to others - and he is right.  In a sense it is tragic that Hitchens was never able to develop into the outstanding socialist journalist and writer that at his best he showed signs of becoming - and instead became - as Seymour notes, paraphrasing Hazlitt, 'a living and ignominious satire on himself'.  It would be farcical now if Richard Seymour, who founded a blog called 'Lenin's Tomb' precisely to rightly provoke those with essentially petty-bourgeois and individualist prejudices against the most important and outstanding revolutionary Marxist thinker after Marx himself - ever ended up himself succumbing to the kind of hostile pressures he once so detested and still warns us against so eloquently and effectively in Unhitched.


Edited to add: For more on Marxism and intellectuals, see Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, Vols I and II (1977/78) and Paul Blackledge, (2007), ‘Marx and Intellectuals’, in David Bates, (ed.) Marxism, Intellectuals and Politics.

The Strange Case of George Galloway

Firstly, I am not sure how many readers I still have left as I have so neglected this blog of late, but for those who still remain apologies - I feel I owe you something.  Obviously, there is much one could talk about - the world crisis - the ongoing processes of revolution and counter-revolution in the Middle East and North Africa, and the current anger of millions of people against the Tories means it looks as though we are in for a distinctly hot autumn" in Britain, and there are many upcoming conferences and demonstrations in Britain I really should remind people about - not least the demonstration on October 20 in London that could just possibly turn out to be the biggest demonstration in British trade union history and if so could then give enough confidence to people to lead to, just possibly, the first General Strike in British history since 1926.   But I am instead sadly going to briefly blog about George Galloway, the MP of the small left-wing party - Respect - that seems to be in the process of imploding so soon after its recent dramatic success in Bradford West earlier this year - and for reasons oddly directly related to Galloway himself.  I say sadly, as what looks like it could be the beginning of the end for Respect is not something to be welcomed by anyone who wants to see a credible democratic socialist alternative to the austerity politics of cuts and privatisation of the mainstream political parties in Britain.

It is too soon to really pass any kind of judgment on Galloway himself - the future is unknown and perhaps in the future this current moment will come to be seen as one of the many downs in a careers that has been full of ups and downs - or perhaps when political historians of the British left come to look back at this particular moment, it will register merely a footnote.  Lets hope so.  But at the moment, it seems to me that Galloway is currently bearing some eerily strange resemblances to another independent socialist MP 100 years ago - Victor Grayson, who was elected against all the odds to parliament to represent a seat in Yorkshire - Colne Valley in 1907.  

Lenin described Grayson as 'a very fiery socialist but one not strong in principles [esp on imperialism] and given to phrasemongering,' but as Brian Pearce noted, Grayson's 'name became for a few years an inspiring symbol to advanced workers... His election threw the official leaders of Labour into consternation. But in a comparatively short time, he eliminated himself from the political scene owing to personal weaknesses.'  His biography - entitled The Strange Case of Victor Grayson - was written by Reg Groves, a pioneering British Trotskyist.

There are important differences between Grayson and Galloway (Grayson was politically weak on imperialism and his personal weaknesses included alcoholism -whereas Galloway is generally strong on imperialism and famously a teetotaler), but it seems here that a personal weakness of Galloway - in this case his sexism which recently manifested itself with respect to the Assange case (forcing Respect leader Salma Yaqoob to resign from the organisation and Respect's parliamentary candidate in Manchester, Kate Hudson, to resign as candidate for Respect) looks like it has been the undoing of his party and may well ultimately come to cost him his own political career - particularly because he seems so unapologetic and unrepentant about what he has said on the matter of Assange.  Of course sexism is not just a 'personal weakness' as such but rather also reflective of the limitations of Galloway's political make up (famously an odd, heady mix whose main ingredients include Third Worldism with a strong strain of Pan-Arabism combined with Old Labourism with a dash of Stalinism, where 'working class' tends to be identified with masculine, 'macho' connotations).  Anyway, the apparent current implosion of Respect is a sad moment for socialists in Britain - but the coming looming struggles ahead mean that the potentialities and possibilities for forging a new left and a genuine socialist alternative from below remain.  Hopefully the great majority of Respect members and former Respect members will still feel able to be part of that broader political project - a project which has to be against not only racism and imperialism, but also sexism and other forms of oppression.     

Cathy Porter on Alexandra Kollontai

Personally Kollontai experienced severe isolation. She was isolated from her class as an aristocrat who was a Marxist. And she was isolated from her sex because she was one of a very small number of intellectual women in the Bolshevik underground.

In exile after the defeat of the 1905 revolution she wrote about how social relations changed in revolution—and how Marxists had to bring these issues into an analysis of class relations.

She was utopian about morality and believed a new self-sufficient and independent woman could be born of class struggle. She had read Frederick Engels, Karl Marx and August Bebel. But she wanted to go further to write about a new sexual morality.

She talked about free love and free unions—and showed how the working class was already freeing itself from the shackles of bourgeois marriage.

Change was only going to be possible if women received support from the state for the responsibilities of motherhood and other domestic functions.

When Kollontai’s work was reprinted after the 1917 revolution it had a new resonance and became concrete. It formed the basis of her work as the only woman member of the Bolshevik ­government after the revolution.

Reading Kollontai today, her writings seem timeless and modern.
Full article here for more on Kollontai see here and this is Kollontai on International Women's Day

Tony Cliff on the revolutionary roots of International Women's Day

This year marks the centenary of International Women's Day, now celebrated across the world on 8 March - and still of critical importance today given the continuing reality of women's oppression. Tony Cliff, author of among other things a 1984 work on Class Struggle and Women's Liberation, once described how International Women's Day originated with the German revolutionary Marxist Clara Zetkin at a 1910 international conference of socialist women in Copenhagen.

'Zetkin proposed the adoption of 8 March as International Women’s Day. (Both the date and the idea were taken from a demonstration of American socialist women in New York on 8 March 1908 in opposition to the bourgeois suffrage movement there.) The proposal was approved with enthusiasm by the conference. Beginning in 1911 and continuing until the outbreak of the war, International Women’s Day demonstrations were organised in practically all the main cities of Europe. (Of course the most important one was the single one which took place during the War – in February 1917 – and launched the first Russian revolution of that date.)'

In a 1981 article on 'Alexandra Kollontai: Russian Marxists and Women Workers' from International Socialism, 14 (Autumn 1981) (not yet online but see here), Cliff described how the day took roots in Russia before the 1917 February Revolution:

An International Women's Day was held on 8 March every year since 1911 in a number of countries. The first time the event was observed in Russia was in 1913. It was not held on 8 March but a little earlier, on 17 February, because of fear of police interference. To commemorate the day a special six-page issue of Pravda was published. It contained articles about women workers, the significance of International Women's Day for the socialist movement, and pictures of leading revolutionary women like Clara Zetkin, Eleanor Marx, and Vera Zasulich.

Celebrations took place in five cities: St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Samara and Tblisi. The largest celebration was in St. Petersburg. It was organised by a group of women textile workers and Bolshevik activists such as KN Samoilova and PF Kudelli, who were part of a special holiday committee set up by the Bolshevik-controlled Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP. The main meeting of the day was held in the great Hall of the Kalashnikov Exchange. The Police were there in full force. At the entrance both mounted and regular patrols were stationed. Inside, police occupied the first two rows. Exactly at one o'clock, they closed the doors of the hall and would not allow even those with tickets to enter. Despite this, over one thousand people managed to crowd into the hall. One of the main speakers, a textile worker, Ianchevskaia, summed up the meaning of the assembly thus: 'the women workers' movement is a tributary flowing in the great river of the proletarian movement and giving it strength.'

These words and the general spirit of International Women's Day grated on the nerves of the bourgeois feminist Dr Pokrovskaia. She wrote: 'As we expected, the women workers' day did not protest at all against the subordinate position of wives in relation to their husbands. They spoke primarily of the enslavement of the proletarian woman by capital, and only in passing mentioned domestic subservience... Does personal freedom really have such paltry significance in the eyes of proletarian women that it is not even worth talking about? That is inconceivable! When that same proletarian woman sets up her own women's day, she will give voice to protest against such laws, her resentment of them, and demand t abolition. At the meeting Mme Kudelii was wrong in asserting economic interests are the most important for the woman worker. Personal freedom stands higher. The pet rooster is always full, and the wild eagle is often hungry. All the same, we prefer eagles.'

Her conclusion was simple: all men benefitted from male privilege; women must join together to fight it.

In 1914 it was decided to celebrate International Women's Day with large open meetings in the larger workers' quarters of St. Petersburg. Unfortunately these plans were blocked by the authorities. Ten meetings were requested, but the Government granted only one.

On the 23 February extra detachments of police were on the streets; there a large crowd at the one legal meeting; instead of five speakers there were only two. The others had been arrested on that day, and the police had forbidden substitutes. Many of those present, disappointed and angry, spilled out into the streets, singing revolutionary songs, but they were eventually dispersed by the police, who carried out mass arrests.

Both in 1913 and 1914 deep differences manifested themselves between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks regarding the celebration of International Women's Day. The Mensheviks wanted only women to participate in the celebrations, while the Bolsheviks insisted that International Women's Day should be celebrated not only by working women but the entire working class.

During the war it was far more difficult to celebrate International Women's Day. In 1915 and 1916, despite a government ban, the day was commemorated by small meetings and celebrations.'

However, it was to be International Women's Day in Russia in 1917 that remains the high point, as Cliff noted:

In January 1917 a police report noted that

'the mothers of families, exhausted from endless standing in line at the stores, tormented by the look of their half-starving and sick children, are very likely closer now to revolution than Messrs Miliukov, Rodichev and Company, and of course, they are more dangerous because they represent that store of inflammable material for which one spark will set off a fire.'

It was the women workers of Petrograd who started the revolution of 1917. On 22 February (7 March) a group of women workers met to discuss the organisation of International Women’s Day the following day. V. Kaiurov, the worker-leader of the St Petersburg district committee of the Bolshevik Party, advised them to refrain from hasty action:

'But to my surprise and indignation, on 23 February, at an emergency conference of five persons in the corridor of the Erikson works, we learned from comrade Nikifer Ilyin of the strike in some textile factories and of the arrival of a number of delegates from the women workers, who announced that they were supporting the metal workers. I was extremely indignant about the behaviour of the strikers, both because they had blatantly ignored the decision of the District Committee of the party, and also because they had gone on strike after I had appealed to them only the night before to keep cool and disciplined. With reluctance the Bolsheviks agreed to [spreading the strike] and they were followed by other workers – Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. But once there is a mass strike one must call everybody into the streets and take the lead.'

Not until 25 February did the Bolsheviks come out with their first leaflet calling for a general strike – after 200,000 workers had already downed tools!

The massive wave of strikes and demonstrations was the culmination of years of accumulated anger. As one witness later recounted:

'The working women, driven to desperation by starvation and war, came along like a hurricane that destroys everything in its path with the violence of an elemental force. This revolutionary march of working women, full of the hatred of centuries of oppression, was the spark that set light to the great flame of the February revolution, that revolution which was to shatter Tsarism.'

It was the women workers in the textile industry who elected delegates and sent them round to neighbouring factories with appeals for support. Thus was the revolution detonated. It was, as Trotsky said,

'... a revolution begun from below, overcoming the resistance of its own revolutionary organisation, the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed and downtrodden part of the working class – the women textile workers.'

It was these same women who fraternised with the soldiers, persuading them to disobey the orders of the officers, and to hold fire:

'They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: “Put down your bayonets – join us”. The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd. The barrier is opened, a joyous and grateful “Hurrah!” shakes the air. The soldiers are surrounded. Everywhere arguments, reproaches, appeals – the revolution makes another forward step.'

The newly resurrected Pravda acknowledged the revolution’s debt to women in an editorial:

'Hail the women!
Hail the International!
The women were the first to come out on the streets of Petrograd on their Women’s Day.
The women in Moscow in many cases determined the need of the military; they went to the barracks, and convinced the soldiers to come over to the side of the Revolution.
Hail the women!'

Edited to add: Alexandra Kollantai on International Women's Day

Remembering Rosa

Just in time for International Women's Day on 8 March, a series of events in London have been organised to launch The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, part of a new series of her Collected Works.

Edited to add: See this review by Sheila Rowbotham

Priyamvada Gopal on modernity, women and Afghanistan

The real effects of the Nato occupation, including the worsening of many women's lives under the lethally violent combination of old patriarchal feudalism and new corporate militarism are rarely discussed. The mutilated Afghan woman ultimately fills a symbolic void where there should be ideas for real change. The truth is that the US and allied regimes do not have anything substantial to offer Afghanistan beyond feeding the gargantuan war machine they have unleashed.

And how could they? In the affluent west itself, modernity is now about dismantling welfare systems, increasing inequality (disproportionately disenfranchising women in the process), and subsidising corporate profits. Other ideas once associated with modernity – social justice, economic fairness, peace, all of which would enfranchise Afghan women – have been relegated to the past in the name of progress. This bankrupt version of modernity has little to offer Afghans other than bikini waxes and Oprah-imitators. A radical people's modernity is called for – and not only for the embattled denizens of Afghanistan.

Full article here

Dreamers of a New Day

Melissa Benn in the New Statesman reviews Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the 20th Century by socialist feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham. Sheila Rowbotham will be speaking at Marxism 2010 in London in July.

Chris Harman on 'the danger of movementism'

'The downturn has also had an effect on the attitudes of activists within revolutionary organisations in many countries. They have seen sudden upsurges in one issue movements while the mass of workers have continued to retreat in the face of capitalist offensives. This was the case with the riots of the ‘marginali’ in Italy in 1977, the growth of the anti-nuclear power movements in France and Germany in the late 1970s, the anti-racist struggle in Britain in 1977 and 1978, the peace movement of the early 1980s. It has been easy to draw the conclusion that you can forget about the working class and just concentrate on these movements.

These movements have drawn into political activity new layers of people. But because the working class as a whole has not been fighting, winning these people to a revolutionary Marxist perspectives has been very difficult.

Often, instead of the revolutionary left winning new people from these movements the reverse has happened – these movements have won members of the revolutionary left to their non-working class approach. Revolutionaries have begun to make concessions to the idea that the movements’ goals can be achieved without working class action.

The situation has been made worse by the inevitable pattern of such movements. They can rise very quickly, precisely because their participants are not rooted in production. But the same lack of roots means they do not have real power. And so the movements begin to go into terminal decline the moment they have reached their peak. They rise like a rocket and drop like a stick.

Revolutionary socialists who put their faith in such movements receive an initial boost, only then to suffer all the demoralisation that comes with the decline.

Then all the pressure is on the movements’ activists to move to the right. They make concessions to existing society because they find they cannot achieve their goals by fighting it. Revolutionaries who have made concessions to the arguments of the movements get drawn along by this rightward pull. It is bad enough dissolving your politics into a movement that is dynamic, enthusiastic and growing. It is even worse doing so in a movement that is tired, demoralised and increasingly inward looking...

You cannot resist the pressures driving former activists to the right unless you start off with a very clear understanding of the limitations of all one issue movements, however vital the issues they try to fight over. You have to be insistent that they cannot win their demands unless they connect with the struggles of the mass of workers. And that means arguing loudly and clearly for a revolutionary socialist organisation that makes such connections, in theory and in practice...

Of course, we are on the side of the peace movement against the military establishment; but this does not mean we drop our very hard criticism of the ideas of E.P. Thompson. In the same way, we are on the side of all women who challenge their oppression, but we don’t hold back from relentless struggle against the mistaken ideas of middle class feminism.

Nothing is more dangerous than to put forward verbal formulations that hide the difference between revolutionary Marxists and such people.

It is here that we in the British SWP disagree profoundly with revolutionaries who have put forward organisational formulae which, in our view, are designed to bridge the unbridgeable – the idea of a unified revolutionary party on the one hand and the separatist notions of much of the women’s movement.

They speak of ‘an independent women’s movement’ which ‘must be part of the overall working class movement’, of a movement which is distinct but not separate’ from the revolutionary party, so that ‘we organise independently but are part of the wider socialist movement’.

Such formulations are extremely obscure. Does ‘independence’ mean independence from capitalist society, from reformism or from the ideas of revolutionary Marxism? If it doesn’t mean independence from Marxist ideas, is the revolutionary party then allowed to intervene inside the ‘independent movement’? If not, how does it fight the influence on women’s struggles of bourgeois and reformist ideas?

Does the formulation mean that revolutionary socialists have to organise working class women separately from working class men? If so, it is extremely dangerous indeed. For it means organising them separately from the main struggles of the working glass – struggles which usually involve both women and men (although in different proportions in different industries).

You end up organising working class women in the places where they are least likely to experience the power of collective action and to gain the confidence to challenge the system and its ideas, including the ideas that they have to be subordinate to men. You focus on the home or the community, the places where women tend to be most atomised and isolated, not on the factory or office where they begin to discover collective, class strength.

At best you involve yourselves in movements that are on the up but then find yourself trapped inside them without any other arena for struggle, when they are on the down. You drift into the view that this is the ‘independent women’s movement’, that has to be sustained as a question of principle, regardless of the number of people it really mobilises. In the process you demoralise both yourself and any women contacts.

Revolutionaries who attempt to operate such a perspective can hardly avoid being infected by the attitudes which prevail in what remains of the women’s movement – attitudes which see ideas changing through consciousness raising not through struggle, which substitute personal politics for fighting the system, and which lead to greater and greater passivity...'
Chris Harman, 'Women's Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism', 1984. Edited to add: Video clips from Chris Harman's memorial meeting are on the SWP website

One Dimensional Woman

Writing from a Marxist theoretical perspective about contemporary questions of women's liberation remains a comparative rarity, so it was good to read a review of Nina Power's new book One Dimensional Woman in the Guardian by Natalie Hanman (there is another review online here). As Hanman notes,

Debates around gender equality have reached a particularly paralysing state, with a number of issues – from veiling to sex work – caught in a reductive dichotomy of good v bad. Individual choice is repeatedly deployed, conveniently ignoring a structural analysis or collective and historical dimensions. It is all very well to say one has a right to choose – but what about the ways in which that choice impacts on others? There are endless hypocrisies too: note those libertarians who argue that women "choose" to lap dance but ­often fail to ascribe the same agency to women who wear the veil.

Power's analysis is brilliantly acute on all this, with a critique of capitalism running as a clear thread throughout her interrogation of muddled contemporary feminisms. Pro-war "feminists", for example, are taken to task over the veil. Drawing on Alain Badiou, Power writes: "On the one hand, any woman who wears the hijab must, by the logic of secular reason, be oppressed. On the other, if she makes too much of the rhetoric of choice to justify her wearing it, she misunderstands precisely what that rhetoric is for. The logic of choice, of the market, of the right to pick between competing products cannot be used to justify the decision to wear what one likes, if one chooses something that indicates a desire not to play the game."

Jack the Ripper Weekends - leaving Ipswich in 2007

While searching around for bus timetables, I came across the following tempting offer from one local bus company - Beeston Buses, based in Hadleigh, near Ipswich - 'Jack the Ripper' Weekends 2007.

'JACK THE RIPPER ~ Weekends 2007

Dare you walk in his shadow?? As night falls, we delve into the shadowy alleyways and dark cobbled streets of Whitechapel to follow the Ripper's blood-stained trail of terror. We inspect the murder sites, sifting through the evidence and eliminating one suspect after the other Your search will take you to the doorway where the only clue was found and the awe inspiring building where the last victim desperately sought shelter before she was murdered. Finally, by the light of a lone lamp and the shadow of an abandoned Victorian building, we will unmask the Ripper.

SATURDAY:
We depart Ipswich at 1000 hrs for the journey to London. On the way, you will have approx. 3 hours to spend at Lakeside for shopping and Lunch before continuing on to the Hotel. You will check into your Hotel in the Docklands and be given time to freshen up before being taken into central London to begin the walk at 1930 hrs. After your walk, lasting approx. 2 hours you will have a Fish and Chips Supper before the Driver collects you and takes you back to the Hotel for the night.
SUNDAY:
After our full english breakfast, you will be taken into London ready for a 'flight' on the London "Eye" at 1000 hrs. After our flight, there will be time for Coffee by the riverside before boarding your boat for a two course Lunch cruise, complete with stunning views of sights, such as Houses of Parliament and St Pauls Cathedral. You will then be collected and taken into Covent Garden to spend the remainder of the afternoon, before departing at around 1700 hrs for the return journey to Ipswich.'

And all for £113! However, I rather doubt the prospect of 'following the Ripper's blood-stained trail of terror' is somehow going to be that popular now with the good burghers of Ipswich in the light of recent events...

Still, perhaps they could soon offer a deal for Londoners - 'Dare you walk in the shadow' of the 'Ipswich Ripper'? Come to visit the 'shadowy alleyways and dark cobbled streets of Portman Road...inspect the murder sites, sift through the evidence and eliminating one suspect after the other' - after all, I am sure Suffolk police would appreciate help with their enquiries...

Imperialism and women

Several articles of interest in this week's Socialist Worker touch on the question of women and empire. The first by Sadie Robinson is a historical overview of how 'Imperialist powers have repeatedly captured the language of women’s rights and used it to justify imperialism, while simultaneously blocking any reforms that could help liberate women.' In the same issue, Sally Campbell examines why and how women were oppressed in the first place, and finally Michael Rosen invokes a character from Charles Dicken's novel Great Expectations, Miss Havisham, to examine why British politicians are always in the process of constructing a decaying notion of 'Britishness' as a national identity that is rooted in a nostalgia for Empire instead of facing up to the realities of modern British society and its true place in the world.