Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

Where the battle for women’s liberation has shifted onto the terrain of conditions of employment and this can be seen as a gain for working women, capital everywhere still seeks to limit women’s access to employment with a sexual penalty of unwanted pregnancies. It is the duty of Marxists to make these two fronts one struggle and to highlight and make clear their inner connections. The “#MeToo!” movement continues to grab headlines, even as it competes with news of Russian interference in U.S. elections. But this has been a recent development and its staying power so far has yet to prove itself versus the dominant narrative of the 21st century, which is a mostly buried story of reaction against women and their human rights internationally.

Abortion in the U.S. is still formally legal but is now so hard to obtain in some places as to be banned, de facto. For immigrant women in ICE detention it is illegal in practice. It is not legal in Ireland yet, where a great struggle against backwardness is underway. It is under attack in each of the Eastern European countries and in Austria. It is terribly proscribed in most African countries, Latin America and Southeast Asian countries. Honor killings seldom result in murder prosecutions. Genital mutilation has not been suppressed. Sexual slavery is altogether too common and capitalism in all its forms from brutal dictatorial to bourgeois democratic cannot solve the equation of abuse, hostility and suppression of women in their favor. If it were in Capital’s interest it would already be history.

The ascendancy of misogynistic racist Donald Trump to the position of the imperialist U.S. Presidency provoked mass women’s rights protests internationally on January 22nd, 2017, with an estimated 500,000 marchers in Washington D.C. alone, outnumbering the attendance at Trump’s inauguration. Wearing pink ‘pussy hats’ as a moral statement against Trump, they protested “Trump’s stand on such issues as abortion, health care, diversity and climate change.” As AP News stated, “The marches displayed a level of enthusiasm that Clinton herself was largely unable to generate during her campaign against Trump…”[i] No kidding.

As we of the Communist Workers Group (CWG) stated, the election was “Hillary’s to lose”. It is a reflection of the crisis of world capitalism that both left and right bourgeois populism are gaining traction, as witnessed by both Sanders and Trump, with both the Democratic and Republican Parties in turmoil. This populism, both reactionary and “progressive” fills the vacuum of the lack of working class leadership, notably a working class political party. Hillary did not lose because the white working class flocked to Trump. She lost because workers are waking up to the reality of the Democratic Party as providing little more than the Republicans, which means exploitation, racism, poverty, war, climate destruction and the continuing attack on women’s rights and democratic rights in general.

One year into the rule of the ‘pussy grabber’ Trump, we see a great groundswell of women of all ages coming forward to tell their stories of sexual exploitation and violation by power tripping men using the authority and privilege awarded them by capital, religion and bourgeois law. This has also generated some volume of men’s discussion of rape and its deniers, as well as the consent laws, age of consent and of what coercion consists.

We are not in the morals business. We seek however to determine what is socially necessary morality for the present and for a socialist society capable of surviving the death agony days of capitalism. This requires that we affirm the humanity of women, in the first place female workers, positively negating the negation of their humanity enforced by the consciousness and laws that oppress them. We not only seek women’s liberation through socialist revolution; we see women’s liberation as necessary for its triumph and for species survival.

It was Hillary Clinton who in the late 1990’s defended her husband, President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform that cut welfare significantly. Welfare reform was a dagger aimed at the working class, particularly women and minorities. The arrogance and indifference towards the working class from a politician who views herself as a feminist starkly displays the class basis of feminism, which is a bourgeois ideology not designed to lift up the mass of working class and oppressed women. Its history is even less salutary.

“The entire enterprise of welfare reform was paternalistic, premised on the idea that poor people, especially poor black women, are poor because they don’t want to work; in reality, poor people, especially poor black women, are mostly poor because there aren’t enough jobs, too many of those that exist pay horribly, and childcare is too expensive. Rampant job discrimination and segregation in housing and education sets poor people on a path to economic marginalization. What follows is political demonization.” (Salon, “The betrayal that should haunt Hillary Clinton: How she sold out working women & then never apologized”)

That the bourgeois women’s movement was able to gain access for professional women to political, managerial and educational positions is undeniable. That these venues remain largely closed to the majority of women, who not only face exploitation as wage slaves, but also are on the brunt end of brutal discrimination and oppression as women is also undeniable. The special oppression of women remains a pillar of capitalist society, in America and abroad.

The questions of equal pay and opportunities, for childcare, for access to birth control, abortion and women’s health services, freedom from domestic slavery and violence against women are as prominent today as they were during the Women’s movement of the 1970’s. The formal legal equality in statutes of women means little in actual practice and is not supported by the Constitution. As a predecessor to the CWG, the Revolutionary Trotskyist League (RTL), wrote in 1994:

“The legal inequality of women which prevailed in Lenin’s time has almost entirely disappeared in the United States today. Nevertheless, as he so perceptively noted, this has not resulted in women’s emancipation from being “factually downtrodden.” Despite all the glowing pictures of progress painted by the ruling class, women in the United States today—-especially working class women-are no closer to meaningful, genuine equality with men than they were a generation or more ago.” (RTL, “The Struggle Against Women’s Oppression in the 90’s”)

The failure of the feminist movement to achieve the liberation of women demonstrates the limitations of bourgeois feminism and bourgeois democracy under imperialist capitalism in decay and crisis.

“Under current bourgeois laws, women in the United States have generally been granted formally equal rights, both inside and outside of the workplace (provided, of course, that they are not undocumented immigrant workers!). For instance, American women legally have the same rights as men to work, vote in elections, get a divorce, own property, and so on. With a few isolated exceptions, such as the prohibition against women serving in active military combat, the laws of the United States do not officially deny women equal rights with men. There has even been liberal legislation enacted by the ruling class to “protect” the rights of women in the workplace, such as the 1963 Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But behind the thin veneer of bourgeois democratic “equality,” women in America continue to be denied equal treatment, to be treated as second class citizens, to be socially unequal. They continue to experience numerous forms of informal discrimination in all areas of their lives. It is precisely for this reason that the vast majority of women in the United States are not working in highly paid jobs. (In fact,[in 1991 ed. note]75% of American women make less than $20,000 per year!) The discrimination faced by women, though informal, does not take place in an arbitrary or episodic way, but in a systematic manner, both in the workplace and in other areas of social life, and results in women being denied rights and opportunities that are more easily available to men.” (RTL, “The Struggle Against Women’s Oppression in the 90’s”

The fight for the democratic rights of women, as with those of the oppressed black working class, is inseparably tied to the fight for socialism. Liberalism works hard to deny these ties, but only the bourgeois media monopoly permits liberals to keep their fiction current.

Today revolutionary socialist/Marxist solutions to the unsolved issues of the brutal special oppression and super-exploitation of women, people of color and gender nonconformists are attacked, derided and dismissed as anachronistic “mansplaining” with nothing to offer the liberation movement. Under pretence of being the ‘non-vanguardist’–vanguard–of the current liberation movement, an academically inspired politics called ‘intersectionalism’ is offered as the newest supra-class ideological guidance. Alongside ‘identity politics’, ‘intersectionalism’ forges a cross class alliance puting the working class further from its political independence and economic power, back into the electoral phone banks, ultimately disarming the masses who seek an end to the variety of forms of special oppression they suffer under capitalism.

The material basis for the ideology of intersectionality and identity politics is the historic inability of capitalist rule to eliminate the special oppression of women, of subordinated nations, of people of color, castes etc. Given the lack of a proletarian political pole, in particular the lack of a revolutionary workers party and a revolutionary workers international, petty-bourgeois politics dominate, identifying the basis of oppression not in capitalist exploitation, but men, cisgender, white people, and so on, ad nauseum. So instead of class against class, we get the politics of women against men, black against white, the specially oppressed against the not so specially oppressed , and of course electoral politics ueber alles.

Just as the trade union bureaucracy is a transmission belt for bringing bourgeois ideology into the workers movement, these petty-bourgeois leftists either consciously or unconsciously play their political role in service to Capital.

The working class is international, it is multi-ethnic, multi- gender, of all hues and colors, and has, through its historic program and via its politicized vanguard, long sought to eliminate special oppression through socialist revolution. Using the method of historical materialism this understanding was foundational to Clara Zetkin, an early Bolshevik, who in 1896 wrote:

“The liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be similar to the struggle that the bourgeois woman wages against the male of her class. On the contrary, it must be a joint struggle with the male of her class against the entire class of capitalists . . . To be sure, [the proletarian woman] also agrees with the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement, but she regards the fulfillment of these demands simply as a means to enable this movement to enter the battle, equipped with the same weapons, alongside the proletariat.” (Zetkin, “Only in Conjunction with the proletarian woman will socialism be victorious”, 1896)

At the risk of ‘mansplaining,’ in a brutal polemic against the practices and ideology of capitalist class ‘democrats’ the Communist Manifesto declared:

“The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the [communist aim is that ed.] instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.” (Marx/Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”)

For Marxism the moral question–the vile nature of special oppression– is connected by a thousand threads to the relations of production. The capitalists’ amorality, their disregard for the life and body of our commodified being is universalized and compounded by an ego-inflating race and gender hatred. Racist and sexist ideologies find their material basis and justification in the ruling class’ compensatory self-aggrandizement. To find a path to liberation workers must understand the Domestic Mode of Production (DMOP) as not only a source of profit for the exploiting class but as exploitative social relations which can only be eliminated by working class women taking leadership roles in socialist revolution.

The oppression enforced as a consequence of capitalist social relations, historically hits all social strata, the capitalist’s precious family, blessed by the church as the foundation of economic and moral life, is itself an oppressive institution enforcing capitalist rule. Through its structure it creates an ideology–its false consciousness– which it projects across society.

Under the crisis of capitalist decay the family’s very existence becomes a virtual fairytale fantasy of bygone 60’s TV episodes. For many working class families basic survival is a daily struggle that poses the question, “will the economy allow my family to survive, to have shelter, education, medical care today?”

While on the other side of town, for the technocratic and managerial middle and upper classes, the ideal family remains an authoritarian source of economic manipulation and paternal control. Despite producing a variety of alienated familial relations, some of which trigger and feed social or cultural resistance and such ebbs and flows notwithstanding, the cultural image reproduced from its existence is the ideal bourgeois family–the patriarchal top-down unquestioned authority, mimicking capitalist hierarchy–the cultural and social norm.

It is this social norm–the patriarch–elevated by its prominence-its apparent ubiquity-which the intersectionalists ascribe to every cisgender white male. Theoretically and in social/political practice the foundation of class exploitation as the material basis of special oppression is replaced ideologically with a non-class based but gender and race basis for special oppression.

Those who denounce class analysis as ‘mansplaining’ are reserving the leadership of the ‘intersectional movement’ for the bourgeoisie. And we do not have to scratch too far below the surface to find the interconnectivity between the World Social Forum (WSF), the foundation funded organizations of the specially oppressed and their Democratic Party hacks touting their role as “Identity Politicians.” Pick an advocacy group, any advocacy group and look at its contributors and boards of directors, all of whom make sure these faux liberation groups never advocate working class political independence. These groups, every one of them, shovel you into the booth for the Democrats.

“Wait!!, you smear us by omission,” the righteous anarchist intersectionalists cry!

No fear, we are happy to address you accordingly. You claim to be the true advocates of anti-authoritarianism and join in alongside the intersectionalists where they include the working class, not as the motor force of history, but as one of a number of identity constituencies. This is the same con job foisted by the Jack Barnes tendency in their 1970-1971 SWP-US Internal Bulletins. Historically, the intellectually honest and astute anarchists agree with Marxists on the method of historical materialism, its conclusions as far as capitalist development are concerned have even self-described as anti-statist socialists. Herein lies their contradiction! Making their alliance with the intersectionalists, they perpetuate a movement with no class based solution–no road to workers power! Just as with Occupy, under the influence of the anarchists, which opposed the fight for the workers party and the workers historic program, these blowhards leave the fight for the workers party and open the door for the historic popular front–the NAACP-NOW-AFL-CIO bloc with the Democratic Party and so stop the intersectionalist movement from offering something liberatory to the masses.

Consider Lenin’s Pravda article on the occasion of International Working Women’s Day 1921:

“… under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed. The working woman and the peasant women are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly—and this is the main thing—they remain in household bondage”, they continue to be “household slaves”, for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the family household.”

One the other side of the coin are those socialists who denounce as ‘identity politics’ any attempt to address special oppression. Most notable is the ex-Healyite, David North tendency of the International Committee of the Fourth International/Socialist Equality Party (IFCI/SEP) who run the “World Socialist Web Site.” In March of 2012, the SEP presidential candidate Jerry White wrote that the “killing of Trayvon Martin is not fundamentally about race” (“The killing of Trayvon Martin and the social crisis in the US”). This is intellectually a flight from the social reality of American capitalism, where the black population is terrorized, beaten and killed by the cops virtually every day. Politically, this is below even the “We have nothing special to offer the Negro” this side of socialism of Eugene V. Debs. The SEP has no special set of demands to address discrimination in the ‘here and now’. While stating that “All forms of discrimination….must be abolished”, something that could be found in a corporate employee handbook, they raise no demands such as mobilizing labor (they have written off the trade unions as bourgeois organizations) to defend the black communities against racist cop terror, even as they sneer at the #MeToo campaign. In their “Documents of the SEP Founding Congress: Statement of Principles”, a whole section is devoted to “Identity Politics”, while they mention women exactly zero times.

As Leninists, we recognize that ‘special’ forms of oppression exist under capitalism, be it racism, sexism, national oppression, or anti-LGBTQ discrimination. The question of democratic rights is hardly a trivial question for a Marxist party that seeks to be not “the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.” (Lenin, “What is to be done”)

It was the Bolsheviks and the early Communist International that broke from the crude economism of Eduard Bernstein or the indifference of those class reductionists like the SEP today, and who recognized that sections of the class also face horrific discrimination and oppression and that special demands need to be raised to address these other forms of oppression as part of the program for socialist revolution.

“The difference—and it was a profound difference—between the Communist Party of the ’20s and its socialist and radical ancestors, was signified by its break with this tradition. The American communists in the early days, under the influence and pressure of the Russians in the Comintern, were slowly and painfully learning to change their attitude; to assimilate the new theory of the Negro question as a special question of doubly-exploited second-class citizens, requiring a program of special demands as part of the overall program—and to start doing something about it.“ (James Cannon, “The Russian Revolution and the Black Struggle in the United States”)

The fight for women’s liberation poses strategic questions for the international proletariat. A workers movement that does not fight to liberate women will never win socialism. The same can be said for black, Latino and immigrant rights. Put another way, the necessary structural renovation of the workers movement for the fight for socialism will involve the battles against special oppression at every turn. The logic of the demands of the specially oppressed will be understood and embraced by ever more militant, fresh layers of worker leaderships.

Material Basis of Women’s Oppression: Away from Nonsense, forward to scientific socialism

Marx and Engels made a great start in their analysis of oppression, notably in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, where Engels grounded women’s oppression with the rise of pastoral and agricultural societies…private property and the subsequent sexual division of labor. Modern capitalism is a system in which pre-capitalist domestic social relations are indirectly ‘exploited’ by the capitalist class. The consciousness of that reality at the level of distributional relations produced post-war feminism. But this is to start at the conclusion of the anthropological investigation. We refer the reader to the detailed examination of the Domestic Mode of Production in On the Domestic Mode of Production.

Once again, see the work of our predecessors, the RTL: “The Struggle Against Women’s Oppression in the 90’s.” Here we employed the Marxist method and this excerpt is from the document adopted and published in 1993.

“Women have not always been domestic slaves. They have not always been regarded as submissive, inferior beings whose only (or principal) role in society is child rearing and domestic toil. The oppression of women is very clearly a social question, not an eternal fact of biology. As Frederick Engels showed over a century ago in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the oppression of women originated with the emergence of class society and private property, and the dissolution of kinship (clan) society. Clan society was based on communal ownership and hunting-gathering, in which the women were responsible for providing the necessities of life for the community. They did this through food collecting, horticulture, subsistence agriculture, herbalism and the production of clothing. In these classless societies, women were independent, highly respected and relatively sexually free. However as the clan began rearing animals and cultivating land, it started to produce a surplus of food and livestock, which could then be stored or traded with other clans. Over a prolonged period of time, a class emerged to take control of this surplus: a ruling class. Because it was the men who hunted and became responsible for raising the livestock, they came to dominate class society. The patriarchs took control of the communal property and also seized from women the control of their fertility, creating the monogamous family.

“The overthrow of mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. . . . The establishment of the exclusive supremacy of the man shows its effects first in the patriarchal family, which now emerges as an intermediate form. . . . The original meaning of the word ‘ family’ (familha) is not that compound of sentimentality and domestic strife which forms the ideal of the present day philistine; among the Romans it did notatfirsteven refer to the married pair and their children but only to the slaves. Famulus means domestic slave, and familiais the total number of slaves belonging to one man.” (F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 120-127 (emphasis in original).) “Monogamy was the first form of the family to be based not on natural but on economic conditions-on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property. . . . The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.” (1d.,pp.128-129)

Through the patriarchal family and the institution of monogamous marriage, men in the earliest class societies safeguarded their property by ensuring that it was passed to their offspring and only their offspring. By taking control of women’s fertility, these early class societies were able to reduce women to the role of child rearer and domestic slave. The domestic enslavement of women was thus systematized. These basic features of women’s oppression continued through barbarism, slave society and feudalism. As Engels made very clear in his writings on the origin of the family, the oppression of women originated with the emergence of class society. For Engels, the oppression of women can be traced back to the division of primitive society into classes that evolved with the accumulation of wealth, property and social surplus. Under slavery and feudalism, female monogamy continued, and production was carried out by the whole family unit within the household. Only with the rise of capitalism did the nuclear family first appear specifically as a unit of reproduction of labor power, as it exists today. The household was replaced by the factory as the principal locus of social production, and legislation was introduced to restrict the involvement of women in industrial production. As a result women became completely responsible for domestic labor. With the arrival of capitalism, the oppression of women reached a whole new level of development.” (RTL, “The Struggle Against Women’s Oppression in the 90’s”

The early Bolshevik Revolution showed in practice that socialism was prepared and able to make immediate legal transformations of the position of women in society and give these legal transformations economic muscle and legal teeth. But Marx and Engels didn’t write catechisms for recitation and adherence for time immemorial. They chiefly developed and propounded the dialectical method and they call on us to employ it and develop theory further from where they left it.

The Domestic Mode of Production

The Domestic Mode Of Production (DMOP) has existed since first revolution (agriculture). The text is excerpted from the Living Marxism article.

“The case for the DMOP is based on the assertion that the watershed social ‘revolution’ which created the patriarchal family as the ’embryo’ of all class society, and which persists to this day, must have had material causes. In other words it must represent a revolution in social relations of production to overcome a barrier to the development of the forces of production. Specifically, it signifies the end of ‘primitive communism’ and collective property that had reached its historic limits, and the beginning of ‘private property’ as the basis for further social development.

“Following Marx and Engels many have argued that the ‘overthrow of mother right’ and the establishment of ‘father right’ was motivated by the interests of men to retain the new wealth from pastoralism in the hands of males rather than see this wealth distributed to the whole clan through the female line [Reich, 1976; Leacock, 1972; 1981; Leacock and Safa, 1986; Reed, 1975; Coontz and Henderson, 1986; Delphy and Leonard, 1992]. These commentators agree that the consequence of the overthrow of mother right was to appropriate domestic labour as a form of ‘slavery’ [Leacock, 1972:41]. Yet it seems that none have seen the need to take this analysis to its logical completion and make the case for a specific DMOP that would first arise out of primitive communism and before the formation of ancient society.

Engels stated the obvious point that the ‘overthrow’ served the interests of men and talked about the male/female relationship in ‘class’ terms. Yet, apart from documenting its historic reality, and virtually demonstrating that ‘private property’ originated as the ownership of ‘women and children’ ….” (Living Marxism, “On the Domestic Mode of Production”)

Then follows a discussion of the social position of women today, reinserting the class line others have notably deleted, as DMOP continues…,

“Imperialism has not liberated women from domestic slavery any more than it has created a universal Capitalist Mode Of Production by destroying the remnants of all Pre Capitalist modes. In most of the ‘third world’, the former ‘second (soviet) world’, and even the ‘first world’, women are still the most oppressed and exploited labourers. Capitalism continues to extract the surplus-labour of women as privatised domestic workers, and as a consequence, as members of the reserve army of wage-labour. As imperialism spread across the globe it incorporated existing gender relations into capitalism so that women comprise a major part of the global reserve army. They are more unemployed or underemployed than men; work under worse conditions than men, while remaining the source of unpaid domestic labour. Therefore, typically, women remain second-class citizens under capitalism, because they are primarily privatised workers who are often excluded from the market, except when they function as reservists in a specific range of ‘women’s’ jobs performing ‘nationalised’ domestic services, or during times of war or economic boom.

It is this prior engagement as domestic slaves that makes them part of the reserve army of wage-labour. However, in times of crisis or of expanding accumulation, women compete with men for equality in the labour market. In the post war boom, this movement of women into wage-labour and up against the gender gap has generated a gender consciousness of oppression. The women’s movement can be seen to have developed in stages along with capitalist development as a movement for equal bourgeois rights that must, however, necessarily fall short of full equality….”

“Since capitalism necessarily creates an expanding reserve army and since women are always available as domestic slaves, there is no way that capitalists can produce domestic goods and services more cheaply than those provided by unpaid domestic labour. Because of capital’s class interest in exploiting unpaid privatised domestic labour, and using women as reserve army labour, democratic demands for equality of women cannot be achieved under capitalism. Some women may achieve relative economic equality, especially under the ‘new’ conditions of post-fordist flexible accumulation, but most women will remain in the reserve army.” (Living Marxism, “On the Domestic Mode of Production”)

The DMOP is continuously adapted to and articulated to the succeeding dominant modes of production. The Living Marxism article continues…,

“If the DMOP is a mode in its own right, patriarchal power and ideology serves to reproduce that mode. Its historical origins can be reconstructed to fill the huge gap in Marxist analysis of women’s oppression. Its historic importance was in overcoming the barrier to `progress’ constituted by kin-based social relations in the primitive community and freeing-up the development of the forces of production. But the price of this progress was that the domestic mode was not superseded and was to remain a subordinate mode articulated to a sequence of dominant modes for which it provides unpaid domestic labour. It cannot transcend itself until such time as domestic labour is socialised. In the classic Marxist literature there is no cause to suppose that this will happen before the transition to socialism. Therefore since its origins in the first social revolution the evolution (and forms) of the DMOP has been largely determined by the dominant mode to which it is articulated.

Today within a sub-mode articulated to the CMOP, the domestic class struggle over unpaid domestic labour, is subordinated to the capitalist class struggle over the rate of exploitation. The residual DMOP ‘ruling class’ of males, act as agents of the dominant CMOP ruling class. At all times, but particularly in times of crisis, when capital imposes its solutions onto the backs of the workers and underworkers, men may support the intensification of domestic labour and reinforce patriarchal ideology by the use of male violence. Therefore, before women can free themselves of capitalism as the main enemy, they have to free themselves of capitalism’s male agents. The only conclusion that we can draw from this is that women must struggle to take their place alongside and as equals to men in the vanguard of the socialist revolution.” (Living Marxism, “On the Domestic Mode of Production”)

The Way Forward! Women’s Liberation through Socialist Revolution!

We reject the capitalist connivance at control of women’s liberation movements. Capitalists seek to reify the consciousness of an inherent subordinate female psychology that is biologically determined, not socially conditioned along with the rest of the social baggage of sex roles. They do this even as they put the drive to enlist women of all classes in their parliamentary “representation” scheme. This scam is supposed to cover for the disappearance of employment conditioned by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and the basic rollback project of reaction holding sway among the thinkers of the capitalist class. Women are supposed to be pleased to see more sellout female spokespersons and legislators shoveling the increasing burdens onto their backs and shoulders! Within all bourgeois “reforms” we find austerity measures and the first targets are all females: working women, poor women, the pensioned retirees and immigrant females and their children. Capitalists seek to put female faces on some who will share responsibility for the increased misery. Thus a workers program for women’s liberation must begin with provision for survival of the one productive class in society, as we were instructed in The Transitional Program. We seek to begin fleshing this program out with this contribution to the Marxist discussion.

Equal pay for equal work! For free quality education and job training for all!

For free 24-hour childcare! For fully-paid maternity and paternity leave! Pass the ERA!

Build working women’s self-defense committees at workplaces and in our unions to stop discrimination, violence and sexual abuse!

No forced sterilization! For free quality healthcare for all! For free abortion on demand and full reproductive services as part of socialized medicine! For women’s health clinics in every neighborhood and town! Nationalize the healthcare, pharmaceutical and medical supply facilities without compensation to the major shareholders under workers control!

Jobs for all by spreading around the available work through a 30 hour workweek at 40 hours pay! For living wages at full prevailing union rates! Nationalize the commanding heights of the economy without compensation under workers control! For a rational, socialist, centrally-planned economy based on social needs, not profit managed through democratic workers councils and committees!

Working women to the front as leaders of a class struggle workers movement! Build a fighting internationalist workers/labor party to fight for a workers government based on workers councils and militias!

Women’s liberation will only be achieved through socialist revolution! For world socialism, the last, best and only hope for the future of humanity!