Women have built this movement too!

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"Militant class strurgle is not the prerozative of male workers". A LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE MEETING Socialist Organiser's Labour Party conference meeting this year will be on building Labour Party workplace branches and the fight against the Tories. Speakers will include activ ists who have had direct experience of building workplace Jack Smiley's article last week sat rather uncomfortably on the Women's Page, straining somewhat at the seams. Unfortunately, like Tom Mann's speech, it did contain "crude, sexist and economistic" elements. For instance, the statement that it is "the labour bureaucracy that has been historically responsible for reproducing patriarchal values within the working class" is a rather gross over-simplification.

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Similarly, the assertion 'that it is only through the common mobilisation of women and men, together in struggle against a class that is grinding them down, that men are going to be broken from the disfigured conceptions that they have of women", while true, begs a whole number of questions.

And he does seem to have swallowed Bea Campbell's bait in identifying militant class struggle as the prerogative of male workers (though clearly he draws different conclusions). He cites the great dockers strike of 1889 - he could equally well have pointed to the match girls strike. Women have built this movement too!

The 150 years of accumulated experience of class struggle doesn't just revolve around the actions of skilled male workers.

This said, Jack Smiley's approach is still infinitely prefeable to Bea Campbell's classpacifism, and he does point to a real issue that needs to be taken up: the rhetorical cooption of the "insights of the women's movement" in the service of rotten class collaboration.

The Labour Coordinating Committee is foremost, though not alone, in this process -smarmy nods in the direction of feminism and then back to the real business of stabbing the left in the back. But they are very selective "insights" it draws on. Not only socialist, but radical, separatist feminists should be outraged by this sleight of hand.

One of the mechanisms for this is the myth of the "patriarchal-isation" of the labour movement. The ascendancy of the skilled male white workers' interests at the expense of other groups, especially women, is pointed as the original sin of class politics.

Activity

The reality was rather more complex; the conclusions the opposite of Bea Campbell's:

"In a variety of ways they were able to find means of protecting their position within an increasingly stable system. They left behind the mass politics of the earlier part of the century, which represented more of a direct challenge to the whole system of industrial capitalism at a stage when it was far less secure and established. In branches. Gerry Byrne take is up a debate opened b y Jack Smiley (Socialist iser 142).

doing so; the skilled workers also left behind the unskilled workers and the women, whose way of life did not allow their participation in the more structured political forms. These forms required both regularity of working times and regularity of income for participation to be possible."

The point is women. were active in the early working class movement, the Chartists:

'This was a transitional period in which traditional forms of political activity - such as mass demonstrations and other acts which involved entire families and communities -coexisted with early versions of the more sophisticated organisational forces which were to be the pattern of late 19th century politics. women • . . nad previously been involved in food riots and demonstrations, early female friendly societies and trade unions. in the 1830s and 1840s women continued to be actively involved. They organised food boycotts and occupied churches. They were particularly active in demonstrations against the new Poor Law. of 1834 and in the 1842 Plug riots. Women were also active in the internal organisation of the Chartist Movement, attending meetings, decorating halls and speakers' wagons, and they were important in the social side of the movement, creating, for example, alternative schools for children.

Feminist This is something of a contrast with the picture of women's passivity presented by both Jack Smiley and Bea Campbell! It was the stabilisation of capitalism, fuelled in Britain especially, by massive imperialist expansion, which created conditions for the dominance of patriarchal values in the working class movement. Alongside this, developed a new bureaucracy of the movement but with material interests apart from it.

Nor did this go unchallenged. One thing that is missing from virtually all feminist accounts, which serve to berate the male-dominated left, is the role of conscious socialists, Marxists.

The arguments • around women's right to work, against male protectionism, created enormous divisions in the working class movement internationally. It was the Marxists who consistently took the side of women's rights, seeing their involvement as central to any strategy to overthrow capitalism.

It was those who continued the Chartists' stance of irreconcilable war with the system who resisted women's exclusion, and TUESDAY OCTOBER 4, 5.30PM KING'S HOTEL, BRIGHTON Mary's Hospital, London W9. Photc those who would settle for carving out a comfortable (or at least tolerable) niche within the system who championed male privilege within the labour movement.

Now, if the LCC and their ilk were serious about the insights that women's history offers the labour movement, if they were genuinely concerned to find forms of organising which don't exclude women, they might care to look at the insurrectionary actions of Chartist women. They don't even need to look that far back. "Bourgeois" feminism provides many examples of militant direct action: hunger strikes, arson, damage to property.

If they're keen to look resolutely to the present, where do they stand on fire-bombing sex shops or "rough justice" for. rapists? While we may have sharp political differences with all these actions, they do seem to indicate that militancy, even violent, direct action is not and never has been an exclusively male preserve.

Bea Campbell is not wrong in wishing to broaden out the concept of class struggle beyond simply "point of production" industrial action, but in removing the "struggle" element. The answer is not to go back to the early working class movement, where the distinction between "industrial" "community" and "political" action barely existed, negating 150 Christine Cadin. years of experience. The openness of that movement was the product of the formlessness of the working class and the infant instability of capitalism. What we need to do is recreate that unity and openness on a higher level, drawing on that experience.

An idea of the potential (though that's all it is at present) for overcoming these distinctions between industrial, political and community action can be gauged from the struggle against the missiles. The combination of women organising in the community reaching out to isolated women, mass political demonstrations and industrial blacking is potentially unstoppable. Once again posing a mortal threat to capitalism would be the best way to revive the memory of that early unified movement.

Arenas

For women, the separation between industrial, social and political arenas of struggle has never taken much of a hold. It's an index of how spurious is the LCC's commitment to women, that their central campaigning plank within the Labour Party is to drop any further moves to democratise the party and freeze discussion on policy. Since women's representation has not been won and there are whole areas of policy concerning women which have never filtered up, this can only damage our interests. (It's no accident, e.g. that women in CLPD have rejected this strategy).

And if you look at one area of policy which the LCC is concerned to change - council house sales « again it doesn't look as if much consideration has been given to women's interests.

Since the net effect of Tory housing policy will be to create a subsidised sector of homeowners and a ghetto of poor (low-wage and claimants) council tenants, trapped in highrise, under-maintained, unsuitable flats, who are the likely losers if Labour acquiesces with his policy? Single parents (9/10ths women), the low paid (two-thirds women), claimants, families with children and homeless single people.

Only men, by and large, can afford to be home-owners. so much for concern for women and breaking out of the stereotype of the white, male, manual worker!

For too long has the soft left been able to use "feminism" demagogically as a cover for its craven retreat, feminists in the labour movement must stand up and disown this ploy - we can speak for ourselves thank you.

(Quotes from 'Women and Radical Politics in Britain, 18201914' in "Dreams and Dilemmas" Sheila Rowbottom, published by Virago.

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