Anti-feminist 'socialists' Anti-feminist 'socialists'

The establishment media's coverage of International Women's Day on March 8 focused, not on the thousands of women who marched demanding better wages, child-care services and access to education, full reproductive rights and an end to racism, but on those who have "made it" — successful politicians, businesswomen and media personalities.

This was par for the course. The powers that be need to portray feminism, a potentially powerful force for fundamental social change, as a movement that has nothing to offer the majority of women.

What may have surprised some is that the conservatives' ideological onslaught is supported by some "socialists".

A two-page feature, "How can we win our liberation", in the March 7 issue of the International Socialist Organisation's newspaper Socialist Worker buys, lock, stock and barrel, the capitalist media's definition of feminism.

The ISO, like the capitalist media, caricature feminism either as "the outlook of women who have made it or aspire to get up the ladder" (liberal or bourgeois feminism) or as a movement that "sees gender as the central divide in society. 'Men' are the problem, and all women have a common interest in a struggle against all men" ("radical" middle-class feminism).

In its attempt to reduce feminism to a bourgeois plot, the ISO counterposes it to the "women's liberation movement" of the 1960s and '70s which, it argues, related to working-class women because it arose alongside an upsurge in the workers' movement.

In the process, it chooses to ignore history and the enormous struggle that the feminists of that period had even to be taken seriously by the male-dominated, social-democratic union leadership of the time.

The ISO conclude that with the decline of working-class struggle (the reasons for which they do not explain for fear of exposing the treacherous role of their "workers' party", the ALP) "the real dynamic of feminism became much more apparent" [italics added]. This is a gross misrepresentation of the heterogeneous and ultimately progressive character of the feminist movement — past and present.

Like the movement of the 1960s and '70s, the feminist movement today, while smaller and narrower, continues to pursue demands that are first and foremost in the interests of the majority of women, working-class women: equal pay, free, 24-hour child-care, equal access to education, accessible abortion services. Had the ISO made a genuine effort to be part of the recent IWD marches, they would know that.

The reason for the ISO's hostility to feminism is revealed at the end of the article, in the claim: "... unlike ruling-class women, working-class men can be won to fighting against women's oppression because they do not benefit from it" [italics added].

The ISO refuse to acknowledge that men, as individuals and as a group, have a material interest in women's oppression. As a sex, they have better access to education, jobs and higher wages; they don't bear the burden of a dual shift of waged work and unpaid domestic labour; they have sexual access to women. Institutionalised privileges and advantages flow to men from the oppression of women in class society.

This oppression of women does run counter to the class interests of working-class men because it divides the working class and weakens their ability to fight and overthrow capitalism. But until working-class men develop class consciousness — until they recognise their class interests over and above their interests as individual men and therefore understand the need to join feminists' fight against sexism — they will put their interests as members of the oppressor sex first.

Marxists struggle to develop this consciousness in the working class because their analysis leads them to understand there can be no separation of the struggle by women against their oppression as women and the struggle to eradicate class inequality.

Marxists also understand that the oppression of women as a sex is an objective basis for the mobilisation of masses of women in anticapitalist struggle. Such a mass feminist movement, which struggles uncompromisingly for equality for all women, will inevitably pose the need for the reorganisation of society in the interests of the majority.

The ISO's refusal to understand the central function of women's oppression under capitalism leads them to abstain from building the movement for women's liberation, and hinders the development of a stronger movement for socialism.

By Lisa Macdonald

