[The following article appeared in the June 14 issue of the French Trotskyist weekly Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Today, many of us women supporters of Rouge are organized in women's groups that are struggling against the oppression we are subjected to - on the job, in the home, and in the high schools and universities - because we are women. Our participation in the "liberation movement" frequently gives rise to criticism and mistrust on the part of early feminists:
"Rouge had nothing but scorn for the MLF [Mouvement de Libération des Femmes-Women's Liberation Movement]; now you are trying to win us back." "The women from Rouge come here [to the MLF] only to bore from within." "Have you come here as women or as supporters of Rouge?"
This last question has always amazed us, because it seems absurd to separate the struggle for women's liberation from the struggle for socialist revolution. However, these suspicions are easily explained by a glance at the way in which revolutionary groups have viewed the woman question.
The Workers' Movement and the Women's Struggle
The feminists are suspicious because they have been able to assess firsthand the attitude of the traditional workers' movement toward them.
The Communist party. There is no need to take up in any detail the CP's reactionary ideology on the family and the role of women. The CP has understood nothing about the oppression of women in the family, so that the question of organizing women has never occurred to them. Women are simply supposed to vote for the candidate of the left, the only way to reach advanced democracy and then socialism, which will enable the family to "blossom" and the woman to "reconcile more harmoniously her role as 914
mother and worker (!)."
They see an independent women's movement as serving no useful purpose. Their only response is the Union des Femmes Françaises [UFF- Union of French Women, a CP-dominated organization of the type Stalinists manipulate in the mass movement. We should not underestimate, however, the jolt the creation of MLAC [Mouvement pour la Liberté de l'Avortement et de la Contraception — Movement for the Freedom of Abortion and Contraception] gave certain local UFF groups.
LO and A/S. LO [Lutte Ouvrière- Workers' Struggle] and AJS [Alliance des Jeunes pour le Socialisme - Youth Alliance for Socialism] share a total lack of understanding, in both theoretical and practical terms, on this question. Prisoners of their routinist interventions, they have failed to understand the importance of the struggle for abortion and contraception, and have no concept of the importance of taking part in the struggle of a movement like MLAC.
In its magnificent isolation, the AJS tranquilly ignores the radicalization of women —as it ignores a good number of other things. Lutte Ouvrière, however, is more pragmatic. They know that abortion and contraception are problems that affect women workers, as do the double workday and the superexploitation of women workers. In addition, Lutte Ouvrière does speak about abortion and contraception in order to gain a few votes at election time and to appear serious in their section in FO [Force Ouvrière -Workers Power, a trade-union federation]. But their refusal to become active in MLAC, their rejection of any independent organization for women, is proof of their theoretical and practical weakness. Although they cite "becoming rooted in the working class" as a high-priority objective, what they fail to understand is precisely the fact that an independent women's movement could only strengthen the class struggle and the rooting of revolutionaries in the working class.
Révolution! Two months ago Révolution! organized a national conference of more than 200 women workers, from which a platform of demands around the theme of the superexploitation of working women emerged. The exchange of information about women's struggles was undoubtedly fruitful (women workers from the Lip [watch factory] were there), but oddly enough the platform said not a word about the need to form an independent women's movement, although these are the same comrades who fought all year in the MIF neighborhood groups to split the movement along the lines of a clear, class-struggle platform. Instead of taking women's specific oppression as their starting point, all the groups formed around this political orientation ended up as tiny Révolution! action committees, reduced to those in political agreement with Révolution! In these circumstances, what do revolutionary women's sense groups make?
In the last analysis, the one thing that characterizes all these approaches is workerism. For a time we ourselves were not free of this concept. But what we have always said, and continue to be correct in saying and repeating, is that there can be no liberation of women without a socialist revolution, and that women will never see their struggles get anywhere unless they try to link up with the working class.
This orientation, while correct in principle, has in fact either led to doing nothing (Lutte Ouvrière, AJS) or to speaking solely to working women without understanding what an independent women's movement should be.
For an Independent Women's Movement
Today, after numerous hesitations and errors, we have come to understand the absolute necessity of an independent women's movement. The more we struggle against our oppression, the stronger becomes our will to make the socialist revolution. For the two are dialectically linked! The "sexist" feminists must understand the necessity of addressing working women, the necessity of linking up with other anticapitalist struggles; they must understand that their battle against "guys" is a battle against the wrong target, that they must also be able to organize with men in certain struggles (such as in MLAC), that the struggle against our oppression is a concrete struggle against a system that makes use of and benefits from our oppression.
Revolutionists, on the other hand, must also understand that far from being a diversion from our classstruggle priorities, the existence of an independent women's movement is an indispensable tool for intensifying the class struggle. When women at Lip or Cerisay struggle against their boss and become conscious (often at a later time) that they are oppressed in the home, and that there is nothing "natural" about this, they become formidable militants. For they will no longer put up with any form of inferior status, any form of racism.
When women fight for day-care centers, not only do they call into question the enormous profit the system extracts from their unpaid labor, but also the crying lack of employment for those millions of "unemployed women" who are called "housewives." When they demand day-care centers, they are also raising the question of their children's education in our society, an individualistic education within the closed framework of the home, where repressed women repress their children. Women's struggles have an anticapitalist dynamic and an enormous power for undermining the system. This, moreover, is why the bourgeoisie has always fought them so violently.
Women: A Force for the Socialist Revolution
Revolutionists must also understand that there can be no genuine socialist society unless women are truly liberated.
The historical task for organized women during a period of transition will be the task of destroying the bourgeois family. Why them? Because they have everything to gain and nothing to lose (unlike men, who are privileged under the system) but their chains!
In China, women were in the van- July 8, 1974
guard of the struggle against the return to a system of production based on the family, for they were defending their conquests: Access in a massive way to production (and this is no slight matter when millions and millions of women have been limited to domestic tasks) and the collectivization of agricultural labor were the only guarantees reinforcing the socialization of household tasks, the socialization of child rearing, and thus the basis for the disappearance of women's inferior status.
Organized women are one of the social forces that will have the conscious task of destroying the patriarchal family in socialist society — one of the essential tasks in abolishing the domination of one human being over another and progressing toward communism.