Man-made language

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THE ONLY book I have between the sexes. And read recently which render- quite right too. So is that ed me literally speechless all we need to do about (well,, very nearly) was language? Like hell it is.

That many words and aspects of verbal communmany of the ways we use ication - including listenExtra-parliamentary action: Saltley Gates mass picket 1972 Extra-parliamentary action: Cromwell ANNE CONNELL continues our series with a review of Dale Spender's book 'Man Made Language' (published by Routledge). em is geared not to mass self-rule, but to administering the country according to the interests - in the last analysis, after consultation and cooption - of the owners of large property.

It is 150 years since the British labour movement emblazoned on its programme the demand for annual parliaments. Under Suppened in Britain in the last two years would have been stopped in June 1980 (in so far as a government replacing Thatcher could stop it). Yet those on the Right of the labour movement who insist (I think rightly) that a socialist government should be willing to accept its own dismissal by a majority of the electorate (in Britain, anyway, that would be a clear working class majority), are content that Thatcher should be free to play Nero for five years. They have forgotten the whole working-class socialist notion of developing and deepening the existing democratic system, and they denounce those like Tony Benn who want to develop it (I think very inadequately) as antidemocrats.

Sins?

Foot is ambitious: he wants to decorate the rightwing Labour float in the democratic carnival with the heads of Marx, Engels and Trotsky.

aged, England there might be that. ll a peaceful transition. to socialism. He quotes Engeis (selectively) to this effect.

This is less than serious.

Marx and Engels did talk about the possibility of peaceful socialist transformation in Britain, the USA and perhaps (Marx said he didn't know enough about its institutions to be sure) Holland. Why?

Because in those states the bureaucratic/military systDale Spender's Man-Made Language.

2/42 em was not a majur force. And is that still true in Britain today? Read Tony Benn's account of the realities of rule in Britain today!

Trotsky and Lenin, says Foot, only 'thought perhaps that other Parliaments might be as futile or obstructive for their purposes as the." Russian Duma' They made the mistake of thinking the British Parliament was 'fashioned in the same mould' as the Duma!

This •assertion means only that Foot has not read, for example, Trotsky's detailed analysis of British politics, 'Where is Britain Going?' Trotsky, says Foot, 'would never had been guilty of the infantile, querulous condemnations of Parliament and Parliamentary action which some of his self-styled followers adopt... Trotsky, the foremost literary genius brought forth by the Suviet Revolution, would surely have disowned with one sweep of his pen the whole breed of modern Trotskyists' (because of our sins of literary style?)

It is quite true that some of those calling themselves Trotskyists have many of the traits of anarchism, and sometimes come close to rejecting Parliamentary action. The attitude of the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) to the Labour Party, for example, is a necessary by-product of its attitude to parliamentary action - one of dismissal and the pretence that it is irrelevant.

(But they do of course believe in democracy workers' democracy, through workers' councils).

Sympathetic

Effectively the SWP rejects political action except for general socialist the party', and promises of what they may do sometime words are sexist is now a commonplace. Words like chairman, spokesman, mankind - referring to all trade, unionists as 'brothers' - the use of expressions such as 'the man in the street' or 'one man, one vote' - all these clearly reflect a grossly male-dominated society.

Moreover, their use is increasingly being frowned on by women and men who accept - in principle, at any rate - equality Dale Spender's book looks at many different in the furure, counterposed to the realities of the labour movement now. Marx polemicised against the sort of 'political indifferentism' the SWP represents. So did Trotsky: But there aren't any SWPers in the Labour Party.

Foot is trying to tar Labour Party activists with this brush, not because they share the SWP's antipolitical traits, but on the contrary • because they have, with some success, shaken up the political structures of the labour movement.

He drags this in to cover his own tracks, and separate himself from the present-day radicals and revolutionaries whose traditions he invokes, tries to appropriate, and seems to genuinely respect. (He has written at least one very sympathetic essay about Trotsky - in Tribune, many years ago now.

He concedes that, 'it is not possible or desirable that the socialist acceptance of parliamentary institutions should be automatic or uncritical or unqualified' • Foot himself, of course, does accept these institutions uncritically and without other than historical qualification, and accepts confinement to them not just automatically but by reflex.

So much so that he says one of the key questions is, 'Were those who framed the Labour Party constitution right in their sense of balance when they declared that their objective (my emphasis) was to sustain a Labour Party in Parliament and in the country?' Surely this is Foot defining the poverty-stricken, dead end 'goal' that motivates him now and which led him to wheel and deal like an old Tammany Hall apprentice during the last Labour Government. It is Foot's present shadow getting in his light and obscuring the goal which was in 1918 declared to be: the common ownership of ing - but her whole thesis rests on the notion that language is not a totally dispassionate machine, invented in a rational way to facilitate communication (rather like a telephone system) but is an organic part of that communication and affects the way we see reality just as much as it reflects it.

This idea is directly analogous to the position of the black rights activists. Early on in the movement the use of the word black' (a word codified by the activists themselves) was seen to be very important against the use of the word 'negro' la word codified by the white oppressors).

the means of production, distribution and exchange (Clause IV part 4).

Even as late as the 1974 election, Labour's aim was declared to be: to bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families'. 'Sustaining' the Labour Government in Parliament displaced that goal, too.

Naturally Foot points to the scarecrow of Stalinism:

because the Stalinist states display 'the apparent incapacity' to develop or protect genuine, independent institutions of almost any kind' ', Foot concludes:

'Whatever its other manifold deficiencies, Parliament can still symbolise the attempt to settle disputes by better methods than brute force' But this is only another way of saying out of the long history of class struggles in Britain (the decisive ones outside Parliament), the British bourgeoisie has secured a stabie system, crowned . by Parliament; and that, so far, the main political focus of the modern labour movement has been within the parliamentary-political structures of the bourgeoisie, only episodically (for example in 1972) overtlowing those boundaries.

Whether the future struggle can be so confined is the question. The history indicates that beyond a certain point they cannot. Foot's talk of storm-troopers means that he accepts that at a certain point they cannot. What if, outside the will or initiative of any conspiratorial group, there are, for example, mass strikes, and the situation escalates to violent clashes. What, as we asked above, if a radical Parliamentary majority is met by the use of the state reserve Spender's book is full of significant pieces of research and thoughtful insights such as, when in mixed groups, women talk far less than men do, and in the rare cases when a woman does talk for as much time as the average male in the group, she is always seen by the men as boo talkative: garrulous' or Looking at the connotations of words, she points out how, where words started out as direct male/ female equivalents, the. female version has acquired dubious double meanings, while the male version has retained its 'purity'. Examples are sir/madam, courtier/courtesan, mastpowers?

Foot's radical conscience

pays hypocritical tribute to his current vices: the Labour Party needs to use Parliament more ambitiously and more deliberately than ever before' Yes!

Even the quasi-syndicalists of the SWP would agree with that, and of course Peter Tatchell wanted to get into Parliament to help do that.

So why does Party leader Foot continue to collaborate with Thatcher? Why not take up Tony Benn' s call for 'disengagement' i.e. boycott of the Tory structures? That would not be enough, but it would be something.

In fact Foot only mentions this point because he needs an alternative to offer instead of the use of trade union power against Thatcher: "The dominant need is to turn the nation's mind to parliamentary action'. 'Trade union power cannot save us, particularly since at such a perilous time the trade unions are Trade unions as trade unions cannot offer an overall framework for socialist transformation, unless they become a great deal more than trade unions. But they can resist, fight back, make it impossible for the government to govern. They could even bring down the government.

His account of what happened in 1973-4 is a travesty, and his account of what happened after Labour was returned is a 0UI W Or meandering fairy-story.

It was a windfall in 1974, argues Foot, that Edward Heath chose 'to use a General Election to win constitutional battle against people engaged strictly in an industrial dispute' (my emphasis). In deference to Parliament, the initiative to use industrial (and other) extra-parliamentary strength must always come from the government.

What does Foot think er/mistress.

However, fascinating though these snippets are, the book's main thrust is the contention that women are effectively disenfranchised at the very source of all social interaction - language.

Men have very largely defined the world, and have also defined the tools for describing it. So, as well as the acknowledged difficulties that women have in speaking out at all, they have the additional burden of speaking in what is, in effect, a foreign language. We have, for example, no real words to speak in our 1972, when a wave of spontaneous political strikes followed by the TUC decision for a one-day general strike for a political purpose forced the government to release the five dockers quite legally jailed according to an Act of Parliament democratically stamped and signed according to the best of all possible Parliamentary Democratic constitutions?

A petition to Parliament should have been organised?

Direct action, against the democratically elected government's democratically decided. Ilaw, released the dockers; the lack of direct action (partly because people relied on the Labour government) was probably decisive in keeping the Shrewsbury building pickets in jail (in Des Warren's case, for three years).

This is the crux of it:

for Foot, radical direct action is now superseded by Parliament. The labour movement must bow down to Parliament.

• The great bourgeois revolutions, born of struggle against oppressive systems and tyrants, wrote m their constitutions the right of revolt. The American Declaration of Independence, for example, states:

'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

"That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organising its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

... when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evines a under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security"

Tyranny:

It could be argued according to this that for Thatcher to do what is being done now - and which cannot be undone easily — is such sustained tyranny and oppression as to justify an armed revolt against the Tory government.

It the constitution does not oblige Thatcher to let own way about our sexuality.

If Dale Spender is right, then this is no mere philosophical game-playing, designed for middle-class feminists with nothing better to do while the kiddies are at kindergarten and the spinach quiche browns in the oven. If we are serious about women's rights in society, and about women's right to tell their own story with their own voice, then we cannot ignore the tools with which we intend to do the job.

With ail the goodwill in the world, if the tools are warped, then the end result will be screwed up -and there's a male metaphor for you.

the electorate throw her out, why should the electorate be bound by such a manifestly inadequate constitution? The labour movement has every right to struggle outside of Parliament against the government - even according to the idea of democracy in which in the last analysis Parliament has power and authority.

The classic bourgeois theory of parliamentary democracy not only recognised this right of resistance, but proclaimed it one of the basic principles of democratic government.

The Labour Right and Foot do not stand for the spirit or letter of parliamentary democracy as understood by those like the US revolutionaries for whom it was a real, practical, living, vital set of principles for their class in its time of vigour and progress.

By parliamentary democracy they mean the shell and the forms. Theirs is the conservative and timid constitutionalism that would have sustained the status quo of Charles I, the unreformed Parliament before 1832, or the exclusively middle-class Parliament before 1867. • It happens that theirs is the constitutionalism of a formally advanced bourgevis democracy.

They do not stand in the true line of those who cranked that parliamentary democracy forward by way of revolution (the 1640s, 1688-9) and successive reforms. They counterpose the partly ossified, reshaped and neutralised, and now inadequate, resuits of pastrevolutions and mass struggles to the present living labour movement with its needs and struggles - the struggles to deepen democracy, to defend the labour movement, for a different, socialist, system, or for a radically different form of democratic self-rule.

Michael Foot and all his political brothers worship not the once-radiant face of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, but its historic backside. Its face belongs to us.

IKICKOUMTELKORIES Labour democracy and the fight for a Sociots WORKERS Pamphlen Organiser GOVERNMENT 40p plus postage from Socialist Organiser, 28 Middle Lane, London

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Socialist Organiser no. 68 January 14, 1982 Page 12

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compelled to conduct de- fensive, rearguard battles'.