Women and the Vanguard Party

Rosa Luxemburg delivers a speech to a crowd gathered at the Seventh Congress of the 2nd International in Stuttgart, 18-24 August 1907.

The time has long since passed for Communists to consider the place and role of women in the revolution. Investigation of the abundant platitudes we hear, of whether “A woman’s place is in the revolution!” and the like are petty slogans of the “empowerment” rhetoric variety or real calls to militant action, is long overdue. For far too long, we have avoided engaging seriously, critically, and earnestly with the role women should take in building revolution, whether we should know our place under the tutelage of men or take lead in the building of the revolutionary movement and the vanguard party. The time has long since passed for us to consider the particular forms of misogynistic violence which women, as revolutionaries and comrades in the struggle, suffer in the context of our participation in organizing, mobilizing, and educating the masses, particularly from men, both within and without our work in organizations and parties.

Events of the past few months have revealed a pervasive culture of misogyny within the Party for Socialism and Liberation and made abundantly clear to many women, including myself and several comrades with whom I’ve spoken, that no party, as of now, is equipped to protect women, members or otherwise, let alone to champion women’s liberation. Just as the men in our parties and organizations have individually abused us and failed to defend and support us against individual misogynists, every party and organization in the U.S. (and many beyond the U.S.) has allowed misogyny to fester and grow within its ranks and has thereby collectively abused and failed us. For now and, it would appear, for the foreseeable future, Communist women have only ourselves, in truth, to call comrades in the struggle. All men who consider themselves Communists and wish for women to accept them as comrades must, at the very least, be prepared to defend us from misogynists and uphold our leadership in rooting out misogyny. All parties which consider themselves revolutionary and wish to gain the mass support of Communist women should take seriously these questions of women’s place and role, our analysis of our conditions, and our demands. In fact, every party with any hope of becoming revolutionary is faced only with two options: respond to these questions, analyses, and demands and change or continue in failure and eventually die. There is no other option for any aspiring revolutionary party, for without women, there is no revolution at all.

I have discussed these events at length with several comrades, affiliated and not, most of whom are fellow women. We are all of a shared opinion that the Party for Socialism and Liberation, as well as other Communist parties throughout the first world, such as the Workers World Party in the U.S. and any number of British Communist parties, most recently and infamously the CPGB-ML, has completely failed women in these regards. My own belief is that most of these parties are irreparably broken but that, on the other hand, there is still time for some of these parties, the PSL included, to change course. This, however, will require drastic, immediate changes — changes to the party’s ideology, educational work and other praxis, and policies regarding women and, more broadly, regarding patriarchy, gender and the abolition thereof, and advancing the struggle for women’s liberation, beyond liberal notions of equality, in the context of building revolutionary socialism. Otherwise, without the mass support of women, the party will die.

Defenders of the existing practice will criticize this argument by pointing to another metric, i.e., that of women’s increased membership, both absolute and proportional to men’s, in communist parties, as evidence that, while misogyny may be a problem, it is not really so bad. After all, if there are more women in Communist parties than there have been historically, and if cadres are composed of women in higher proportion, then that must mean parties are now safe for and accessible to women. In actuality, as women’s membership in Communist parties has dramatically risen, so has, disproportionately so, I believe, Communist women’s abdication of party membership. The great influx of women, dedicated to revolutionary work, has served to create a massive outflow of women, from every nominally leftist organization, who have suffered misogyny at its worst — who have been preyed upon, humiliated, abused, and discarded.

These apologists resort to every rhetorical device at their disposal to obfuscate the realities of this situation and minimize the scope of the problem. They are usually careful to avoid the word “misogyny” altogether. When they acknowledge misogyny at all, they use the word only in its unthreatening liberal sense, to describe individual attitudes and interactions between men and women. Forced as they are to acknowledge that some problem exists, they respond with equivocation, deploying a variety of rhetorical maneuverings to obfuscate the real nature of the issue and its gravity. For example, they might concede that women are sometimes abused in the context of organizational work, only to then claim that women are really only unsafe in a few, isolated situations — not unsafe on the whole! The issue, they would insist, is not systemic, but individual. Yes, individual men can be misogynistic, even violently so, and some of those men are members of Communist parties, but not all men are like that and the few men who are do not represent the whole of the party. They would argue that, to the extent the issue exists at all, it can be overcome simply by expelling rapists when they emerge (given enough evidence and pressure, that is) and providing a rudimentary educational program on women’s (and even LGBTQ, if their line is particularly forward) oppression. Finally, as we would expect, they implicitly place on Communist women the onus of joining these usually-safe “revolutionary Marxist” parties in order to have our immediate safety and other interests even considered. They would accuse any non-affiliated Communist woman who criticizes a party or its members for their chauvinism and our endangerment of “wrecking” and other such unprincipled (“anti-communist”, even) behavior.

For all their attempts at obfuscation, the goals of the apologists are transparent to most women. Where else is it demanded of women that we must perform intense reproductive labor in exchange for our basic needs to even be considered? Where else are women who complain about such conditions branded as malicious, corrupting enemies or dismissed as emotionally unstable? Communist women who are not members of a party have no legitimate basis to voice criticisms of misogyny within a party, even though, due to this same misogyny, it would not be safe for us to voice our criticisms while members of a party to begin with? These are not new tactics — we’ve seen this all before — and their purpose is especially obvious to the abused women whose trauma they seek to obscure and erase.

Communist women who wish to contribute to revolutionary work are then left, in situations like these, to ask these questions of and among ourselves: When our own parties and organizations are not willing or able to root out misogynists from within their ranks, where do Communist women turn? How else do we contribute to building revolution? Who do we trust as our comrades?

There is no need for the existing “revolutionary” parties in the U.S. and elsewhere or their members to attempt to answer any of these questions (as if we expected them to answer, regardless). The answer to the first two questions is self-evident in the fact that Communist women, particularly trans women, lesbians, and Black and Indigenous women, have abandoned various parties in such high numbers and with such resounding distrust in so-called “Communist” men. When women are not safe in any organization or party, we leave every organization and party — rightfully so! — and are thus rendered unable to contribute in a collective capacity to revolutionary work. The answer to the third question is, then, that we can only trust ourselves; we can only count fellow women as our comrades.

Alexandra Kollontai holds Clara Zetkin’s hand and Rosa Luxemburg stands near behind them in this photo taken at the 1910 International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen.

What, then, for Communist women, is to be done? We could work as individuals on an individualistic basis. Most of us are, with no other alternatives, at this moment, doing exactly that, to the extent we are able to contribute to revolutionary work at all. But we know as Communists that our individual actions cannot be the basis of revolution. We know this is an untenable situation. We understand the need to build a capable, effective, actually-revolutionary vanguard party to lead the revolutionary movements for decolonization, women’s liberation, and socialism. And we realize that we are very quickly running out of time to do so.

We are on the brink of capitalism irreversibly destroying the ecology of this planet, just as colonialism has, for so long, destroyed the ecologies developed and protected by Indigenous practices. Humanity is on the brink of our own extinction and these men pretending to be “Communists” as they abuse women and ignore violence against us are shamelessly destroying our only real chance for survival. Just thinking about this situation is infuriating and abjectly horrifying! The revolutionary struggles against imperialism and colonialism and for decolonization, women’s liberation, and socialism — the only struggles which can save us all — are being held hostage by these misogynist clowns. Humanity might very well go extinct, in part, because so-called “Communist” men refuse to stop harassing, raping, infantilizing, humiliating, overburdening, and otherwise abusing women — the same women who are supposedly their “comrades”! — and because not a single so-called “Communist” party will put a stop to this. This situation is as absurd as it is horrible.

Looking for any viable alternative methods, Communist women ask ourselves: Where else might we go to contribute to the building of revolution than a vanguard party? There are no viable alternatives. Theory explains this. Experience confirms this. Almost all of us seem to know this intuitively and from experience as well as from our studies.

We expect misogyny to fester and grow in organizations with individualist ideological tendencies and decentralized practices, which, by their very structure, inevitably foster unaccountability and opportunism. At the present we see this most clearly from the example of the DSA. For myself, I have seen clear examples of this dynamic in what are called “collectives” of Gonzaloites. RGA is the most well-known example of this, though I’ve personally seen others. Anarchists, meanwhile, have utterly failed, as a whole, to confront the rampant white supremacism (ex: A B C) from their own circles, despite that several white supremacists calling themselves anarchists, who are all fairly popular within anarchist circles, have been called out by Black and Indigenous revolutionaries time and time again. A similar problem exists in their inability to root out rapists, pedophiles, and other sexual abusers, a problem which has also surfaced many times in recent months and years. There is no excuse for this and it is totally predictable. The good, principled anti-authoritarians that they are, anarchists have no ideological inclination to hold each other really accountable for things like white supremacy and sexual abuse. (We have recently seen a horrific example of precisely this in the sexual abuse perpetrated by the “egoist-communist” calling himself Dr. Bones, who, though he has been kicked off the podcast he was hosting and is sure to suffer considerably in his public relations and his entrepreneurship, cannot feasibly be kept away from any of the anarchist organizing spaces he likely frequents by any authority. It is likely he will go unpunished for the crimes he committed.) Even where anarchists have established authoritarian states, such as in revolutionary Catalonia, Makhnovist Ukraine, and now the DFNS, rape has not been dealt with (in the second and third of these examples, in fact, mass rape has been encouraged). Individualist tendencies have always been and will always be unsafe for women, because, from the very outset, they create a situation where, in the absence of the exploited and oppressed masses taking power, the already-powerful are able to take what they want and the already-powerless are left to suffer what they must. In the context of patriarchy, put bluntly, that means marginalized individuals, usually women, suffer abuse from powerful individuals, usually men, without hope for recourse.

But the fact that “organization” (if it can even be called such) on an individualist basis necessarily fosters abuse does not, conversely, necessitate that parties which organize on the collectivist basis of democratic centralism will be safe for women. Democratic centralism is an organizational method which maintains internal democracy and unified, collective action; it is not some magical aegis which, absent any ideological work from a dedicated cadre, promises an impenetrable defense against infiltration by reactionaries, in this case by chauvinists and abusers. If the party collectively fails to act to combat all forms of liberalism, ultra-leftism, and rightism, then democratic centralism ensures only that the collective action taken by party members, however unified it is, will be errant and possibly harmful to their immediate cause and to the revolutionary movement as a whole.

Democratic centralism, in the Marxist-Leninist practice, is not the abandonment of debate, including public debate, for the sake of unity. (This would be, in general, according to Mao, liberalism of the second and seventh types.) It is the right of all members of a Marxist-Leninist party to participate in debate with our comrades and the right of all the exploited and oppressed masses to criticize the party. Just as well, it is our responsibility to follow a unified course once we have collectively, democratically reached a decision on a definite action. This was never meant to be limited to internal meetings, nor could it feasibly be so limited, even if such drastic limits were ideal — thankfully they are not. Lenin railed against the narrow and incorrect Menshevik version of “democratic centralism” which took hold in the RSDLP, such as in “Freedom to Criticise and Unity of Action” (1906), a brief article in which Lenin explains the distinction: “Criticism within the limits of the principles of the Party Programme must be quite free, not only at Party meetings, but also at public meetings. Such criticism, or such ‘agitation’ (for criticism is inseparable from agitation) cannot be prohibited. The Party’s political action must be united. No ‘calls’ that violate the unity of definite actions can be tolerated either at public meetings, or at Party meetings, or in the Party press. Obviously, the Central Committee has defined freedom to criticise inaccurately and too narrowly, and unity of action inaccurately and too broadly.”

Contrast this with the PSL’s own publications, for example, this one regarding “Social media and democratic centralism” from an internal document circulated first in 2015, which has since been substantially rewritten and appears on the Liberation School website: “Communication between members in different branches that does not first go through the leadership bodies of the respective branches — which can be called ‘horizontal communications’ — is generally prohibited.”

This is an absurd policy on its face and one which is selectively enforced — and the selection is quite peculiar. Needless to say, it is only enforced upon party members in the rank and file, not upon leadership. Even so, every member of the PSL I know of maintains friendships and regular contact with members of other branches, which would seemingly count as horizontal. But if one member acts with chauvinism towards another, and this chauvinism and abuse is publicly (or even privately!) criticized, then “horizontal communications” (whatever this supposedly means, I am still waiting for a coherent explanation) have occured, which is alleged violation of democratic centralism. We can see one truly disgusting example of this selective enforcement in the following thread, posted on Twitter by a comrade who, until recently, was seeking membership in the PSL:

There is little else to say on this matter of the abuse of power by leadership than what is so clearly demonstrated in this thread. This clearly has nothing at all to do with Leninist democratic centralism and everything to do with Trotskyist distortions of the very concept. Imagine if Lenin himself was not allowed correspondence with members of his own party regarding matters of the party except if his local leadership had allowed it. In the present day, imagine a scenario in which one party member was suffering abuse from another and, rather than help that member to safety and immediately launch an investigation into the matter, the instance was dismissed and covered-up under the guise of “horizontal communications”; this second scenario doesn’t need to be imagined, as it has actually happened to myself and others within the party.

In this distortion, the Party for Socialism and Liberation reveals itself to share a misunderstanding of democratic centralism commonly expressed by anarchists: Both errantly believe that democratic centralism has to do with the subordination of the participatory freedoms of party members, including their safety, to an unaccountable central authority, rather than subordination of individual action and of the elected committees and other organs of the party to collective decision-making on a democratic basis. The only difference is, quite ironically, that the anarchists correctly point out that such an organizational method, the same one that the Bolsheviks critiqued, would become corrupted and abusive, whereas the PSL seems to think it is an ideal situation. The anarchists, in this regard, are closer to Bolshevism than the PSL, a supposedly “revolutionary Marxist” and “Leninist” party. If only the Party for Socialism and Liberation actually was a Marxist-Leninist party, perhaps it would not make such basic Trotskyist errors and would be actually-democratic.

In sum, within the so-called “democratic centralist” parties, two-line struggle has been completely abandoned and Menshevik-esque distortions of Leninist practices have become actual policy, causing democratic centralism to entirely break down. The Party for Socialism and Liberation and parties like it are really not democratic centralist at all.

Communist propaganda poster for women’s rights, from the DPRK. It reads, in Korean: “Put an end to sexual assault in the 21st century!”

The problem here is not the concept. Our theory, though it needs, as with all science, to be updated and refined, is basically correct. It remains our duty as revolutionaries to build a vanguard party. If the concept of a vanguard party was fundamentally broken, we could abandon criticism of the existing Communist parties altogether, as it would not matter whether any of them could become a vanguard in the first place. We could, for a counterexample, endlessly criticize in as much detail as we want organizations such as the DSA and various anarchist networks for their inadequacies. However, in the end, there is really no point, because, beyond the small amount of good these organizations and disorganized groups do and the considerable anti-communist harm they cause in the short-term, in the long-term of the revolutionary movement, they don’t matter. Instead, the current array of Communist parties — that is, fortunately so, only those within the very limited context of work undertaken by revolutionaries in the first world — are all failed executions of an elsewhere-successful concept. We can contrast these failures with the successes of vanguards in currently-existing socialist and national liberation revolutions elsewhere, e.g., in the established states of Cuba, the DPRK, the PRC, the SRVN, and the LPDR and the ongoing revolutionary struggles in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Palestine, Yemen, the DPR, South Africa, India, Colombia, and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera. Where a competent vanguard exists to lead the masses, the masses continue to rise in consciousness and struggle. The experience of countless revolutionaries throughout the world proves this beyond doubt. We need a vanguard, yes, but a real vanguard, an effective vanguard capable of guiding the awakening class-consciousness of the masses.

No would-be “Communist” party in the first world is, at this time, a vanguard party. Until the existing Communist parties are willing and able to root out misogyny and all other chauvinism, and to center women, especially the most exploited and oppressed of us, in leadership, or until new parties form to take this place, no Communist party will become a real vanguard.

To acknowledge that this situation has harmed the embryonic revolutionary movement is an understatement. This situation has decimated it — and this is not the first time. Let us very briefly consider the place in history and historical implications of this moment. Decades ago, the Black Panther Party, the nearest Communist party to approach actualization as a vanguard ever to exist in the U.S., though it succeeded on multiple fronts in building solidarity with women and LGBT people, ultimately failed to eradicate misogyny within its ranks. This was at a time, relatively recently, when it was severely unpopular to foster connections with gay and trans people; the BPP, though they could have acted with the opportunist social-chauvinism that other purportedly radical organizations did and abandoned LGBT struggle, chose to build solidarity. Further still, the Bolsheviks, though they included women in their leadership and were able to make progress in the advancement of women’s rights and struggle seen nowhere else at that time in history, ultimately failed to eradicate misogyny from their party. The Bolsheviks, particularly the women of the party, should be both celebrated for their unprecedented, progressive achievements and criticized for their ideological and practical failures. (See: Albert Szymanski, Human Rights in the Soviet Union 102–127.) No reasonable person, ergo certainly no Marxist-Leninist, can or should deny this fact. The whole history of Marxism-Leninism is overwhelmingly characterized by great success on the front of women’s liberation. Where there has been failure, there has been criticism and reparation. We have much to learn from our comrades throughout the world, particularly those of oppressed nations, in these regards. When we look to currently existing socialist revolutions in Cuba, the PRC, the DPRK, the SRVN, and the LPDR, we observe that class struggle continues and, in fact, intensifies, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the working classes secure for ourselves the means to build socialism. The same was true in the USSR and the several Marxist-Leninist revolutions of the 20th century. The same is true of revolutions throughout the Third World for national liberation. The struggle, with its innumerable victories, amid all our sacrifices, continues.

The revolutionary struggles for decolonization and women’s liberation will not wait until the struggle for a vulgar “socialism” is declared complete by a so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the first world (really nothing but a dictatorship of white men). No, the struggle for the destruction of all settler-colonialist and neo-colonialist empires, the struggles for national liberation and decolonization, and the struggle for the abolition of gender and of the very classes of man and woman, will continue in tandem with the struggle to build socialism. When the revolutionary movement reaches its potential and the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, it shall first and foremost be a dictatorship of the Black and Indigenous masses to whom this colonized land rightly belongs. There will be no socialist revolution in the first world that does not include payment of owed reparations to the liberated colonies, internal and external. As for women, the struggle for our liberation will not wait for socialism or stop once it is achieved. Throughout the whole socialist revolution and the process of building of a communist society, a dictatorship of proletarian women shall reign, a revolutionary state which ensures our liberation from patriarchy, which shall wither away only when, at the end-stage of the development of society into communism, gender, as with all class-distinctions, and patriarchy, as with all class society, cease to exist.

Women stand at the front of a demonstration organized by the Marxist-Leninist Black Panther Party against the incarceration of their comrades in the party.

But this is only to briefly contextualize the place of our present moment in the whole history, hitherto and future, of revolution. As for the present…

To the PSL and to any other “Communist” parties which foolishly believe they can put the issue to rest by simply replacing the old promises with new ones — you are making clowns of yourselves.

All well and good to affirm in the abstract that women belong in the revolution and that women should take leadership roles wherever possible. All well and good to vaguely acknowledge that misogyny is a real problem and to vaguely speak of fighting it. All well and good to make any variety of promises to women. But believe us when we say that we have seen this all before. Most of us are frustrated, looking for real answers. Some of us are apathetic and bored. All of us know what false promises of change sound like. Only, we normally hear such promises from any number of abusive men we are forced to deal with in our lives, not from “Communist” parties which remarkably simulate all the same dynamics.

Communist parties will need to begin with real efforts to regain the trust of women, particularly trans women and particularly those of us who are survivors of the most violent forms of misogyny, as well as, in the colonialist occupations, the Black and Indigenous masses, if these parties have any hope of becoming actually-revolutionary. We need a revolutionary vanguard party — one which takes its leadership from women, from Black and Indigenous peoples, from the most oppressed and exploited of the masses. A revolutionary party which heeds this call to embrace decolonization and women’s liberation as integral to the struggle for proletarian dictatorship and for revolutionary socialism might actually succeed in taking on this role of the vanguard. Meanwhile, all parties which fail in this regard will self-relegate to a continuation of their current irrelevance, wallowing in their own ineffectual opportunism and social-chauvinism, wasting away and disintegrating, and ultimately dying, even as the burgeoning class-consciousnesses of the masses rises. This is where any so-called “Communist” party which fails to take guidance from the most exploited and oppressed of the masses rightly belongs.

The coming days and months will prove which of these the Party for Socialism and Liberation really is.