Originally published as a Radical Women position paper 1973
Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Which Road Towards Women's Liberation: A Radical Vanguard or a Single-Issue Coalition?" In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 47-58). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
“It was enough for opportunism to speak out to prove it had nothing to say.” This was Rosa judgment of Eduard Bernstein’s attempt to dilute the theory and program of the German revolutionary party in the late 1800s by emphasizing reform over revolution, mass action over theory, the number of supporters over the quality of support, and militant liberalism (petty-bourgeois radicalism) over intransigence on goal and methods.
“The final goal, no matter what it is, is nothing,” said Bernstein, “the movement is everything.”
It is a sad commentary on our own supposedly sophisticated times that today it is not enough for opportunism to speak to be exposed and discredited the proponents of popularity at any cost are all around us, espousing their shopworn doctrine that the mass movement is everything and the program a secondary consideration. Action for action’s sake, unprincipled coalitions for the sake of bigness or status, and capitulation to the lowest ideological common denominator of the movement have all resulted in a tragic, unnecessary and extremely dangerous backwardness and pragmatism in the general movement for social change.
The worst manifestation of this pathetic need to be loved instead of respected, to be a multi-class spokesperson for everybody instead of a revolutionary tribunal for the oppressed masses, is the horrific notion of the “single-issue movement.”
This theoretic excrescence was born out of too-painful isolation, nurtured during a prolonged vacuum of real revolutionary leadership, and perpetuated by the tremendous reactionary pressures of capitalism bearing down hard upon a student/middleclass radicalism that remains basically disconnected from the proletariat and the super-oppressed minorities and working women.
“Single-issueism” is the process of crossing class lines and watering program down to a broadly acceptable minimum plank in order to construct an all-inclusive coalition that can achieve a particular demand or reform. “Single-issueism” is the highroad to reformism and invariably ends up in the most crass revisionism of revolutionary thought. Single-issue socialists in the peace movement announced five years ago that the Vietnam War could be ended by coalition between radicals and liberals, pacifists and revolutionaries, politicians and hippies, generals and privates, etc. Instead of building a radical antiwar movement and constantly striving to raise its level of consciousness and revolutionary thrust, the single-issue-ites transformed themselves from radicals into organizers of liberals, and switched from the previous goal of socialism to the new utopian illusion of “peace” under imperialism. To their vast shock and surprise, they had to witness the incredible spectacle of the movement growing up and over and past them, eventually outflanking them on the left and coming to view them as latter-day prototypes of the old Stalinist/reformist mold.
A similar current is still extremely strong within the movement for Black liberation. Based on the thesis that American Blacks are an oppressed nation rather than a super exploited and oppressed race-class, the “pork chop” nationalists, as the Panthers dubbed them, call for all-Black unity in a struggle for “our piece of the pie,” i.e., Black capitalism and Black affluence within the capitalist structure. The single-issue “Black Experience” agitators furiously denounce alliances based on class and on common grievances, and vie desperately for support from the system. Meanwhile, except for the Black Panthers, no vanguard exists to elevate the awareness and level of the movement.
The single-issue is the dead-end issue. It always ends up smack against the wall. True, it is large, but it is also, invariably, diffuse, ambiguous, contradictory, deceptive—and mercurial. Like CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, it moves to the right, not to the left, and it moves radicals right along with it, especially those radicals who are busiest assuring us that this is the only way to fly and that the enemy is being outsmarted by being joined.
“By any means necessary,” which used to mean that any needed and effective means would be used, now translates into “any means whatever are necessary,” whether or not they really are. So expediency, safety and opportunism come to be labeled as “necessary,” and all’s well with the world.
Single-issueism is an inevitable violation of revolutionary clarity, integrity and responsibility, yet it persists because the ruling class confers respectability upon it.
Is it any wonder then, that the embryonic women’s movement is retracing these barren pathways in its search for direction and character?
Every regional conference seems to place the question of “Reform or Revolution” at the top of the agenda, but every regional conference seems to leave the question unresolved. Indeed, we are definitely informed at some of these conferences that a “hardened position” on this issue will “alienate and drive away our newer supporters”and besides, a lot of older members don’t believe in socialism anyway!”— as if this answer to the question had one iota of theoretic or strategic integrity.
The burning question remains, despite endlessly sophomoric attempts to evade or postpone it: Is women’s emancipation a single-issue reform that can be won by a mass, all-inclusive, coalition of indignant and perplexed women? Or is it, by virtue of the nature of capitalism and the economic role of the family, a revolutionary question that demands a vanguard organization of ideologically developed women whose mandate is to radicalize the affinity-group coalitions, organize working class women, constantly enrich and update the theory of the movement, and call regularly for the united front when specific events demand massive intervention and demonstration?
Is women’s emancipation a matter for liberals or radicals, and in what order? Is it a matter of psychology or politics? Is it, in other words, separate from or integrally connected to the questions of caste, race, and class?
Radical Women, as an organization, studied and answered these questions for itself before it proceeded to organize, and clarified and strengthened its answers in the course of its first stormy year of existence, a year marked by differences, factions and finally splits over these very issues.
Unlike any other women’s organization in the country, Radical Women theorized first and organized later, understanding full well, as a result of long experience and observation, that the “medium” is not the “message,” that form is not content, that the movement itself is not “everything.” Instead, theory remains, as always, the guide to action, and without a revolutionary program there is no effective and consistent organization and activity.
Radical Women, then, started with program and developed authentic radicals, radical about capitalism and about women’s rights. Radical Women is self-mandated to build a mass radical liberation organization composed of serious women who mean business when it comes to male chauvinism, class and race oppression, and revolutionary political power.
Still, we realize that the tens of thousands of women new to the movement must find their own way, on their own terms, to the deeper grasp of the essential nature of the movement. We confidently expect that the persistent and patient exposition of our viewpoint will continue to be highly effective in raising the general level of consciousness among women militants and that our principles will soon prevail as the characteristic instead of the atypical outlook of women’s liberation.
Our stated beliefs on matters of program, structure and tactics are essentially as follows:
1. Women’s liberation can only be attained by a movement of radical women.
It was the radical women, socialist women, who kept feminism alive during the ’40s and ’50s and introduced it into the New Left, long before woman’s “place” became a practical problem in the organizational life of Students for a Democratic Society, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and the peace movement.
Socialist women, reared on Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Bebel’s Woman Under Socialism, and Lenin on the Woman Question, greatly influenced Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan (notwithstanding the ungracious lack of acknowledgment!). Those socialist women on the campuses, studying economics, history, literature, sociology, anthropology and psychology, forced the issue into academic life. Only a handful of women, socialist women, offered political support to the hard-pressed Black women “matriarchs” of the freedom movement, soon to be consigned to ignominy and defeat by the brutal new cult of Black male supremacy.
Socialist women initiated the mass actions on behalf of legalized abortion, comprehensive childcare, and legal reform, and socialist women unionists led the fight for on-the-job equality and the upgrading of woman’s work. Every woman’s issue that the liberals, independents, professionals and the government have since supported and adopted as goals was originally catalyzed into prominence by women radicals and radicalized women who know that what is most sorely needed in the movement is leadership.
Given the existence of a leadership core that organizes, plans and organizes, the mass will materialize and fight heroically for clear goals. Some reforms will and can be won; other issues are purely transitional and can be achieved only under socialism. But through every mobilization and on every issue, radical women steadily work to radicalize the entire movement and expand the vanguard itself.
Without such leadership, the women’s movement, like every other movement, will petrify, corrode, adapt and drown inside the Democratic Party or inane single-issue liberalism. Or, it will adopt an ultra-left, insanely sectarian and/or terroristic stance, born of desperation and bitterness (much like SDS), and become consumed in its own hysteria. This ultra-left sector already exists, and only theory and logic—the lessons of history and experience—can persuade it into strategic sanity and the passion of revolutionary politics.
Women’s liberation, led and oriented towards the center, will turn into its opposite, women’s reformism, which in turn always becomes an enemy of working class and minority women. The capitalist system cannot grant working and minority women substantial reforms because these would seriously weaken the very pillars upon which the system itself rests: the super-exploitation of minorities and women for super-profits; the cultural oppression of minorities and women as a psychological sop to the male workers who derive unique privileges from their second-class status; and the bourgeois monogamous family as the transmission belt for the continuity of private property, wage labor, and social alienation. Intrinsic change for working, poor, and minority women means intrinsic socio-economic change and the absolute elimination of the institutions of family, property, state, law, and popular culture in their present form.
Women’s liberation, then, is a revolutionary question, and must be, first and foremost, a movement of women revolutionaries. Large, amorphous, petty-bourgeois organizations will continue to exist, and feed their best into the radical vanguard. But radicals must not lead these clubs and take administrative responsibility for them; radicals must win them over to a mass radical women’s movement.
2. The woman question has a dual and triple nature, and is therefore a multi-issue question. I discussed this analysis in an article written in 1965:
As a worker, a Black person, and a woman, [the Black woman] represented the three strands of American repressive culture; every prejudice focused on her and she felt deeply the three-fold nature of the fight for freedom. . .
[The oppression of women] has a dual nature: exploitation on the job connects them to the class struggle, while generalized political, legal and cultural oppression against them as a special “inferior” group confer an independent character to their struggle.
All dark-skinned people are victims of color prejudice. Similarly, what Lenin called “an entire sex,” regardless of class distinction and regardless of whether they are wage earners, is the victim of social prejudice. . .
Since the majority of women are peripheral to public industry and objectively dependent, all women are stereotyped as secondary. All come to represent an undifferentiated domestic function as a sex. . .
When those words were written, the very idea that American women were oppressed as a sex was usually greeted with hoots of derision. Today, it is abundantly clear to most radicals (and even to liberals) that women are the second sex, subject to a virulence of prejudice, discrimination and oppression, not only unsurpassed today by white racism against Blacks, but assiduously practiced inside the Black freedom movement itself. Working women are exploited as workers and doubly exploited as female workers, since their special oppression as a sex permits extra exploitation of them in their capacity as workers, and for minority women, racial oppression adds a third focus of suffering.
So the “woman question,” by its very nature, is both a class question and a special sex question, a race question and a special sex question, or simply a special sex question (where the woman is neither wage earner nor an ethnic minority). But like the race issue, the “woman question” is the product of a particular type of society organized in a particular way at a particular conjuncture of history, and is therefore a question of social fundamentals and great political significance. The subjugation of women is the oldest form of oppression and affects a majority of the world’s population. Women, indeed, are the only oppressed majority.
Women’s liberation is ideologically both independent and interconnected. To regard it as single issue is to deny its integral interrelationships with technological development, property relationships, and the class structure of society.
The burning problems of women, like the burning problems of Blacks, Jews, workers, or rebellious youth, are rooted in the very economic structure of capitalism, and can only be structurally eliminated by the overthrow of capitalism and the creation of a socialist communal society.
Women’s liberation, therefore, demands socialism and special, dynamic role for women in the general movement for socialism. Women, like Blacks, will play a special vanguard role in the general revolutionary movement, for they are specially oppressed and doubly driven by the urgency of their needs for swift socio-economic change. But this special and dual role of women is severely underestimated or completely misunderstood by sections of the general radical movement and sections of the women’s movement itself. The women’s movement is either castigated for not subordinating itself to the “important and basic” questions of the “people” or the “ workers,” or it is condemned for “selling out” to other people’s struggles.
If we adopted the posture of listing ourselves 17th in the scheme of social priorities, we would reveal a theoretical ignorance of the very nature of our struggle—its special, unique and massive character which renders it strategically decisive in any mobilization of revolutionary forces. If we concentrated only on showing how “political” and other-oriented we are, we would be playing the time dishonored, traditional women’s role of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation, traits never known to engender long-lasting revolutionaries.
On the other hand, if we ignored everything else and worked only for women’s rights, we would be flying in the face of our own understanding of the causes of women’s subordination and the real solution to our dilemma. We would become “nationalists” and “separatists” in another blind alley, and again we would be downgrading our mandate for accepting responsibility to the overall movement and its direction.
The correct course lies in a synthesis of the two poles of the women’s movement—its special nature and its general nature—and in always making the interrelationship clear. We are independent and connected; we have an equal and dual responsibility—to ourselves and to others. The interpenetration itself is more important than either the separateness of our oppression as women or the togetherness of our role as political radicals. We refuse to be forced to choose sides in a game of false contradictions. Logically, historically and politically, we are able to reconcile what is atone and the same time identical and different. Through dialectic instead of formal, mechanistic reasoning, we can chart our own course.
3. Our tactic for mass action is the united front.
As a vanguard group, we do not worship smallness or purity or advancedness. We aim at a mass radical woman’s movement, and at mass radical support for our movement. We call for alliances on a principled basis whenever particular issues arise on which many divergent groups can agree, and we promote the concept of the united front as a key lever of building massive actions and raising mass consciousness. But, we refuse to dilute the united front into a classless, counterrevolutionary people’s front which hands power over to the liberal bourgeoisie and glorifies reformism as preferable to revolutionary solutions. We do engage in the united front as long as it is productive and remain ever ready to go it alone should its programmatic integrity and methods become compromised.
Radical Women is a women’s organization and a political organization that maintains its programmatic clarity on many issues while it engages in broad-scale actions with others on specific issues.
We anticipate an eventual permanent united front of radical women, and simultaneous with this, a permanent nationwide regroupment of radicals in a new and vigorous revolutionary party.
4. The supportive or affinity-group character of a woman’s liberation organization should be a result and effect of its primarily political nature, rather than its central reason for existence.
All the sympathy and empathy and sexual solidarity in the world cannot together substitute for a clear-headed ideological understanding of the causes of oppression and the psychological reflex within ourselves. “Friendship is friendship, but politics is politics,” says an old Russian proverb—and program is decisive in summoning our powers of resisting, coping, and changing.
The contention of some women that special soul dialogues and intimate group interchanges are energizing and crucial to expanded awareness is highly doubtful and perpetuates the image of women as inner-oriented, subjective and psychological in viewpoint, as opposed to the objective, outer-oriented and sociological perspective of men.
Naturally, there is some truth to this stereotype because it is nurtured by the culture, but it can easily be overcome and changed, precisely through the expedience of acting politically and objectively, and women can learn to do this with amazing ease if given half a chance.
This question is important as it bears on the single-issue versus multi-issue differentiation, for singularity and subjectivity mutually reinforce each other, as do generality and objectivity. The rap group that never develops into an organization, for instance, perpetuates both subjectiveness and unconcern for related social issues, and organizations that deliberately restrict themselves to a single woman’s issue, or women’s rights alone, perpetuate the feminine, self-oriented mystique. A general political group, however, engenders a mature, objective and international approach which is the only basis for the passion that creates revolutionary change.
Our mutual aid and mutual supportiveness grow naturally out of our common experiences and joint actions, and we do not need to “organize” or “schedule” solidarity. Our fundamental mission is to politically define and then play our role in society; our relations with each other will be conditioned by our success in our basic political mission and also by the very limitations imposed by this perverted society on all human relations.
Our task is to retain and continue to clarify our character and role, never allowing ourselves to become invisible parts of a homogenized blur of everybody and anybody “interested” in women’s rights. Our identity as politically radical women is central to our continued existence and impact. We are an organization with a program, with a structure, with a policy, and with a goal, and without these we would be derelict in our responsibility to the mass of humankind.