We reprint below one of the papers given at the first Socialist Woman Conference in January this year. Discussion of such a general question might seem a bit academic in a paper like The Red Mole: but comrades who are facing the problem of involving women in the fight against capitalism will know how overdue such a discussion is. Women's oppression is so deeply rooted in the processes of everyday life of every person, regardless of class or nationality, that most of the revolutionary left and labour movement have still not thought out the practical implications of their pious wishes for "women's liberation", and find it more comfortable to continue operating on the basis of what is essentially ruling-class ideology where women are concerned. We therefore have to start the discussion at such a general level in order to take in some of these unexamined assumptions on the way to working out our practice today and tomorrow.
Many comrades here will at some point have had discussions of the Leninist conception of the revolutionary party. But for women militants who have gone through this discussion, there still remains a problem: the condition of the revolutionary left today and the backwardness of large sections of it on the woman question. So what I want to try to do now-which I think is necessary and which hasn't been done very explicitly before -is to go from the very general to the very immediate and particular in discussing the relationship between the women's movement and the revolubonary left.
To take the more general theoretical side of the problem first, and make a brief summary of that relationship:
The proletariat as we know is the only class capable of taking state power and smashing capitalism, but until it organises under the adenship of the revolutionary party and on a gramme, if can't be said to sa. The revolutionsess of the working class has to encompass an understanding of the role of all classes and all sections of capitalist society, and this is basically for two complementary reasons: 1. so that it can develop a strategy to smash capitalism, and so that it can bring into alliance with it all those forces which are capable of fighting capitalism; and 2, because the dictatorship of the proletariat isn't an end im itself, but the necessary condition of the struggle for a communist society, a society in which all forms of private property and all the oppressive relationships based on private property have disappeared. So it's necessary for the proletarian vanguard to understand its own historical role, to gain an awareness of alltheoppressive social relationships of capitalist society. The role of the revolutionary party is to intervene in a whole range of struggles, to generalise within the working class this understanding of the various classes and sections of capitalist society, and of its own historical role.
So far, so good: that's a neat rosy picture but how does it relate to the situation today?
The present situation between the revolutionary left and the women's movement can only be understood in a historical context. The oppression of women is such a deep-rooted part of bourgeois society and ideology that even revolutionaries often find great difficulty in breaking from it. The turns and developments in the working class movement during the present century have had a great effect on the extent to which revolutionaries have been able to break from the bourgeois ideology of women's oppression.
If we look at the occasions on which the woman question has been raised in revolutionary struggles, it has clearly always been through the activation of women in periods of revolutionary upsurge: the Paris Commune, the first years of the Russian Revolution, and more recently, to some extent, the experience of the Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions.
In the experience of the Russian revolution, there is evidence in the writings of the time that by the carly 20s, certain sections of the party had come to understand something of the experience of women in the revolution, and what was happening to the proletarian family, as both men and women became active in the party. You can see it in the pamphlets by Kollontai which have recently been republished; and in some of Trotsky's pamphlets. For the first time in the history of Russia a broad layer of women, working class women, were becoming conscious of the nature of their oppression because they were strug gling to militate in the Party on equal terms: the family structure of bourgeois society was no longer passively accepted.
Why do the lessons of this and all the other historical struggles of women appear to have been so largely lost to the labour movement? It is of course a part of the whole process of the Russian revolution -with socialism in one country and the onset of Stalinism the door was opened to the crystallisation of bourgeois ideology in various social forms, within a society in transition between capitalism and socialism. Because of the importance of the Russian revolution to the whole world movement, this meant that the ideological effect on Communist Parties, on the vanguard of the working class throughout the rest of the world was very detrimental. This applied to the woman question as well as the most immediate political questions. So for over 40 years the working class has been dominated by parties which are of the working class but not revolutionary -the Social Democracies and the Stalinist parties-both of which have been incapable of understanding women's oppression in capitalist society.
The revolutionary forces to the left of these groupings are now on the increase on a worldwide scale, and undergoing very rapid growth. But they too have only just begun to give serious attention to the question of women's oppression: and this does not even apply to all the groups concerned, as we know from experience in Britain. The fact that the question is now becoming an important aspect of the intervention of some revolutionary groups, is in part a function of the way the revolutionary vanguard is re-grouping in late capitalist society. Given that the working class organisations have been dominated for so long by Stalinist or social democratic ideology, many of the forces which are first to break from these ideologies are not at the Discussion at Socialist Woman Conference (photo: Anthony Vincent, The Observer) dical feminism or reformism; an illustration of this danger is the hostility showr both to trade unions and to socialist ideas generally —not just specific left organiin Manchester.
The fact that the ruling class is so ready to exploit the effects of its ideology to its own advantage-the media's treatment of the miners' wives and the so-called "Women Together" movement of Andersonstown are just two examples-makes it all the more urgent for the left to clarify its own position and put it into practice.
centre of the working class movement: they include students, young workers who may not have the experience of the traditional labour movement, oppressed minorities such as the blacks within imperialist states, and so on. Of course the process takes place very unevenly, and already we can see that in many advanced capitalist countries sections of the working class are moving to a position where they can break from bourgeois ideology and accept revolutionary ideas much faster than has so far happened in Britain-Spain and Japan are just two striking examples. In general though, it still remains true that the spread of revolutionary ideas amongst the youthstudents and young workers-is very important to the regroupment of the revolutionary left.
Women's liberation has a place in this process-it is in a sense a late outcome of the youth radicalisation. Many of the people in women's liberation have been involved in political movements: more generally they have been affected by the experience of loosening family ties and the revolt against bourgeois family ideology which has been formative for the new generation of revolutionaries too. This process explains the largely petit bourgeois composition of many of the groups in the women's liberation movement: young petit bourgeois women have much more access to this experience, on the whole, than working class women.
So far the experience of the relationship between the revolutionary left and the women's movement has largely been that some women in the women's liberation movement have come to accept or continued to hold revolutionary ideas, and some have joined groups on the left; while sections of the left have woken up to the question of women's liberation. In many cases this awakening would not have happened without the women's liberation movement posing the problem. Some of the groups have however intervened quite a lot in the women's movement in the past two years. sations-by many of the women at the national women's conference held in March But the process is not a nice, smooth gradual one, leading to some point in the future where the two movements happily merge: we live in a class society where class struggle is constant, but develops sometimes very rapidly, sharply changing the context in which the women's liberation movement first emerged. The past two or three years have in fact seen a very rapid acceleration of the crisis of British imperialism, obliging the ruling class to make a very sharp attack on the working class. This makes it very difficult for women's liberation groups to avoid the question of taking sides in the class struggle: unless they take a position, the slide into bourgeois individualism seems almost inevitable-and already the bourgeois press is taking up that side of the women's movement. The way in which we take this stand is of course what we must discuss in the course of this weekend-it's not simply a question of turning to working class women on the issues which immediately affect them, we also have to develop ways in which to combat bourgeois ideology as a whole on the question of women. That is, we don't only want to organise on the question of equal pay: we want through all the work we undertake to go on putting forward our understanding of the role of the family in capitalist society.
But it's not only the women's liberation groups which face a choice on this point. The woman question is now posed for the revolutionary left in rather a new light. When there is a sharpening of struggle such as is going on at the moment, but there is no mass revolutionary party, and no generalised revolutionary socialist consciousness in the working class, it is all too easy for militants to capitulate to backwardness on the woman question as on many other questions. Women's unemployment, the difference between men's and women's wages, and the idea of the 'responsibility of the male bread-winner to 'keep out of trouble'- all these are important instruments the ruling class can use to divide and weaken the working class at the present time. Many trade union militants have no answer to these questions: but this is all the more reason for the revolutionary left to take a clear stand.
It is in this absence of a revolutionary party, and in this context of sharpening class struggle, that the Socialist Woman movement offers a real way forward for socialists in the women's movement, because it gives us the perspective of both propagandising among working class women where there are few enough other forces able to do this; and in a sense, of operating as the 'conscience of the revolutionary left on this question. If in the course of the weekend we can develop a perspective for operating in this way, as women's liberationists who have taken sides in the class struggle, then I think that this development can be very favourable for the building of the revolutionary party in Britain: our movement can contribute to such a party taking a correct line on the question of women and the family from the start. The revolutionary party can then rapidly increase its understanding, and increase the understanding in the working class, of the perspective of going beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat to a truly communist society, and the ending of oppression for women and men throughout the world.
Dear Comrades We have noticed a series of hostile and misinformed articles in recent issues of The Moring Star on the question of the LCDSU. We are very perturbed that in these articles you should accuse the LCDSU of splitting the student left. We are disturbed by this because the forces in the LCDSU are convinced of the absolutely essential need for the left to unite in the lace of the unprecedented State attacks on students. What we do insist on, however, is that this unity be on a principled basis.
That students were under attack from the State became absolutely clear to the mass of students with the Thatcher proposals on the financing of Students Unions. But this was not the first not the only cledocument, various State agencies were on the offensive. College authorities, LEA's and the police and the Courts have actually been given a shot in the arm by the Thatcher proposals. Major struggles have DOCE ward in recent weeks in Lancaster, No mory LSE, Portsmouth Poly, Aston, Brighton College of Education, and many other less well-known colleges New strugdes begin daily. In this situation it is es The Cologne Communist Trial, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Lawrence and Wishart, E3.00)
This book contains all the texts and passages written by Marx and Engels on the history of the first Communist Party in the world, the Communist League (1847-1852). It was this party which signed the immortal Manifesto of the Communist Party. as relevant today as when it was first written. This communist party had remote origins, a difficult birth from the French secret societies in the reign of Louis Philippe. It was the first party whose statutes broke with this type of society and implicitly contained the principles of democratic centralism, well before the term had been invented. This party too experienced internal difficulties - a split. And, of co se, in experienced provocations and repression with the Cologne trial where Marx, from London, denounced and exposed the documents forged by the Prussian police, and did his utmost to support the accused - although in spite of this they were finally condemned.
Among the political docu ents included in this book there is the "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League', written by Marx in March, 1850. Here Marx draws the lessons of the 1848 Revolution at a time when he still thought that the revolutionary wave would rise to a crest again, and - formulating its policy for the future - he concretises it in the unforgettable sentence: "Their battle cry (to the proletariat) must be: the revolution in permanence!"
The Communist League had only a brief life of about five years. But it was a time full of experiences and trials immediately before and after a revolutionary crisis which spread all over Europe. One hundred and twenty years have gone by since then. The world today is totally different; the revolutionary Europe'of 1848 is today no more than a small part of a world completely rent by massive struggles between the forces of the socialist revolution and those of the capitalist counter-revolution. Even in 1848 Marx was denouncing in the Eighteenth Brumaire the alliance posed by the reformists of the time between the proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, which infected the former with the weakness of the latter. More than a simple historical account, these remote years and this communist party of which we are the descendants still have many lessons for Pierre Frank The Threepenny Opera It is not Brecht who is'at fault in Tony Richardson's presentation of the Threepenny Opera' at the Piccadilly Theatre. The stringency, bawdiness and realism in the language of his plays stands out like a sore thumb amidst this tired shell of a production, Allied to Kurt Weill's jarring, memorable music. this enables some of the positive points of the play to be salvaged. For instance, the brilfiant marriage scene where Mac the Knife, chief crook, procurer, demagogue and philosopher weds his sweetheart, Polly Peachum. daughter of London's leading beggar surrounded by gangsters, and dining on newlyafted silver platters. The close friendship between Mac and that gentleman of gentlemen, the Assistant Commissioner of Police. The final capture of Mac the Knife, but then Brecht's eleventh-hour denouement, where sential that all forces on the left unite to fight on all these fronts.
The LCDSU has taken a principled stand against any compromise on the question of autonomy, against state accountability, apainst collaboration with college authorities or LEA's and the rejection of any capitulation to the Courts when used to strengthen the hand of the college authorities. At the same time it has seen its interests as being intimately linked to those of the working class and has attempted to mobilise the mass of students in solidarity with the workers in strugle. Similarly, it has taken an uncquocal sance in sciaton to ine struggic mi Ireland, giving unconditional but not uncrifical support to both wings of the IRA.
The LCDSU is holding its third national conference in Aston on 20/21 May where all these positions will be re-evaluated in the light of our experience over the past period. We invite visitors from the Comment of the attack. Both before and after Thatcher's munist Party and urge the CP to organise its forces in the colleges to clect delegates to this conference nd unite with us on a platform which will bring the eft together and take the struggle against the State in the colleges forward, Yours fraternally.
Steering Council of the LCDSU.
our hero, head in executioner's noose, is rescued by Brittania riding in on a milk-white steed like the American Cavalry, takes the final piss out of both the melodramatic tragedy and the light musical.
Only Barbara Windsor and Joe Melia, forgetting that they are in the West End theatre, portray Brechtian characters. The rest are uninspiring and deathly dull. Unlike his later plays which are didactic and more overtly political in nature, Brecht is content here to portray the struggle for survival of the poor, the reversal of values whereby theft and violence are the bread and butter of many people's existence; also interestingly, the subjection of women to the whims of men, manipulating them like puppets in a Punch and Judy Show. Brechtian drama was meant for the people, intended to be about them and for them. A commercial production like this one can never do justice to the themes, since Brecht himself was anti-traditional theatre, anti-capitalist, and fundamentally a revolutionary so far as his conception of the theatre was concerned. Hisideas about realism alienation and exploita tion in the theatre must be used for the benefit of all people struggling to change the conditions of their daily exploitation. The only struggle that middle-class audiences at West End theatres ever experience is the struggle to reach the bar first at the interval. Phil Cohen AFTER THE MINERS'STRIKEWHAT NEXT? (10p)
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MARXIST May, the day Craig's case was to come up before the University Council, basically the supreme lay administrative body, packed with retired headmasters, clerics and representatives of local gentry and various commercial interests. However in secret arrangements- not sanctioned by any mass meeting-the Student Representative Council had agreed with the Police to have the speaker's meeting at the end of the demonstration take place, not in the large square outside the Town Hall, where the Council were judging Craig's case, but instead, on an obscure and empty plot of waste land, over half a mile out of town.
This reality of bourgeois academic justice and freedom; a rigged trial of a well known and qualified don by a wholly undemocratic body, composed entirely of members and faithful servants of the ruling class, was an extremely blatant example of the underlying political nature of all recent events at Lancaster. And it was as such that it should have been presented to the mass of mobilized students. It was upon these lines that IMG comrades argued for and presented a demand that the But just why did Craig accept such a solution? The explanation lies in the fact that he is an example of that special product of the British Universities, the CP liberal academic with a personal bent towards Utopianism-as witness his actual belief in and advocation of the viability of the Free University within bourgeois society. This deluded Marxist actually believes his new, non-de part mental position to be the foundation stone for the Free University of Lancaster, when in reality he is now none other than the accredited and wholly tamed Marxist, serving as an embellishment to Lancaster University Ltd similar to the long existing Creative Arts•Workshop and the now projected swimming pool.
On Wednesday, 3 May, the mood on the campus was one of general disillusionment. At the mass meeting Craig was applauded by a sizeable section of students as the returning hero, but when after his little speech of justification he started to answer some pointed questions, the talk of "Sell Out" grew apace, The CP controlled SRC, once again helped by imported NUS bureaucrats, attempted to present the settle ment to assembled students as a "partial victory
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The ambivalent attitude of the left has its counterpart in the threatened direction of large sections of the women's movement away from the class struggle into ra-
Open letter to the Communist Party
strike firmly within the context of the height- ened class tension of the last years and puts for- ward a programme around which militants in
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FAKENHAM OCCUPATION speak at a public meeting in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn, on Tuesday. 16