First Published: Canadian Revolution No. 5, April/May 1976
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba
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The present crisis of capitalism affects the standard of living of all the working class and of the people; and particularly the working conditions of women who are relegated to the most backward sectors of industry and commerce. Working women, along with immigrant workers who also lack certain democratic rights, are thus the most “badly treated” of all the working class.
Women of the popular masses have become a large reservoir of cheap labour and are pushed about following the fluctuations of capitalist economy. During war time they were urged to work, but in a period,of “galloping” unemployment such as ours, they are convinced to stay at home, except for the head-of-family-women with no income other than welfare allowances who are compelled to work at minimum wages in order to free the bourgeois state of their burden. More evidence of the oppression of women is in the fact that the very principles which are supposedly sacred for the bourgeoisie, such as motherhood, will vary according to its interests: there is a campaign in Quebec against the right of women to abortion because the lowering birthrate preoccupies the capitalists in search of future labour. On the other hand, in Latin America, women are forcibly sterilized in Order to control the demographic problem and make the situation less explosive for the concerned imperialist countries such as Canada. Yesterday an instrument of domination for feudalism, today an instrument of domination for the capitalist system, the oppression of women, as an historical product of the division of society into classes, is thus a class domination. Therefore, for women of the popular masses, the principal enemy is capitalism.
As capitalism is their principal enemy, the struggle for socialism is therefore in women’s major interest, their long-term one, since only socialism will achieve the abolition of private property which is the foundation of the division of society into classes: such abolition will permit the complete emancipation of women as well as other oppressed strata of the people. Therefore, the objective guiding the intervention of communists among women just as among the entire people, must be the objective of proletarian revolution. This does not deny the specific oppression of women, their specific lack of democratic rights, their right to free abortion on demand, to state-financed day-care centres, to equal pay for equal work, rights which are in fact denied even if officially acknowledged. On the contrary, the struggle for such democratic rights will always be necessary and will make women conscious of the fact that capitalism does not allow them to truly exercise those rights but rather it denies them. That goes also for the right to work which remains purely theoretical if women are compelled to go to work but can’t afford the day-care centre for their children.
But the struggle for democratic rights should not drain all the energies of the communists and make them neglect their principal task for the present period: linking the workers’ vanguard with communism. Such struggle must even be subordinated to the struggle for socialism which is concretized in the task of creating the Marxist-Leninist organization of struggle for the Party. Waging principally the struggle for democratic rights is putting the cart before the horse, it amounts to considering that the work among women and the petit-bourgeoisie will enable us to build up a communist workers’ vanguard, the very force which is so sorely lacking right now inside the Marxist-Leninist movement.
In intervening among working women we should take into account in our methods of work the specific oppression to which women are subjected; yet it is not useful to reserve the democratic rights as their one and only battlefield. This attitude amounts to confining the struggle of women to the exclusive claim for their democratic rights and is contradictory with the class nature of their oppression which has been identified as its main aspect. Women on social welfare, for example, fight in Quebec through the “Association pour la defense des droits sociaux” (ADDS, Association for the defense of social rights) against the payment of the water tax, have mobilized themselves against an oppression related to the present crisis of capitalism which is not specific to women. They are in fact more sensitive to their miserable standards of living caused by capitalism than to their specific oppression as women. Nevertheless, by waging that struggle against the bourgeois state they become aware of the lack of day-care centres, for instance, that would free them of the care of children. This very viewpoint, the Chinese comrades express in the following way:
To gain their emancipation, women must first of all get interested in the political struggle and take part in it. . Engaged in the political struggle to brave the storm and see the world in front, women can understand better the revolutionary principles, heighten their level of consciousness and accumulate experience within the struggle. (The Emancipation of Women, Peking Information No. 10, 1972).
The struggle for the emancipation of women consists principally in their participation in the revolutionary struggle for socialism and not in the women’s liberation movement. So understood, one will see more clearly that the work of communists among women must be continually linked up with the central task of revolution.
Waging the revolutionary struggle at this stage means putting forward among working-class women the importance of the proletarian party as the genuine tool of struggle for women. This also means getting working women as much involved as men, in the communist formation circles towards the building of the Marxist-Leninist organization and then of the proletarian party. With the tool of Marxism-Leninism they will develop and spread the proletarian ideology and forge within the struggle new links between men and women.
As class exploitation is the social and historical root of women’s oppression, they thus have no other choice, if they are to put an end to their oppression, than proletarian revolution; only it, indeed, is able to eliminate the conditions of exploitation and bring about new conditions in their place which will make possible the complete emancipation of women. This is why we say that the emancipation of women is part of the proletarian revolution and that it is one of the tasks of the proletariat whose mission is freeing the human race of exploitation and the class division of society. Women’s struggle must be linked up with the present central task, that is the creation of the Marxist-Leninist organization to rally the vanguard workers.
It is the concrete application of these principles that determines the work of communists in the present conjuncture, at the stage of the creation of the Marxist-Leninist organization of struggle for the party, when the main task is to rally the workers’ vanguard. This is the reason for such work to be done first of all among women belonging to the working class, namely women workers. For the main task of a given period is nothing other than seizing the link of the chain which will most advance the people, and women within it, towards revolution, towards their liberation. Communists who have fully understood this should abandon the idea of putting primary the organization of all women of the popular masses without distinction, into mass organizations for the defense of their democratic rights: nurseries, abortion etc. At the present stage, to not work to rally the workers’ vanguard means remaining politically at a standstill and preventing the vanguard from taking the struggle in its own hands. To not understand the priority of the work of communists among the working class as rallying its vanguard to communism, so that it may build its proletarian party and thus take up the leadership of the struggle of the whole people is to be prejudicial to the women’s struggle by restraining it, since it means rejecting the leading role of the workers’ vanguard in the struggles of the people.