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” Adam. You are not surely suggesting a sort of entryist strategy is being employed to “attract” feminists, in your narrower sense, into the Party , whether or not these be genuine socialists?”
I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t think those behind the motion want to admit non-socialists or reformists but, to be perfectly honest, I do think they want to attract women who think that capitalism should be defined as a “male-dominated class society” and that “capitalism and patriarchy are aspects of the same thing” (the terms in inverted commas are from their own circulars). This is not a Marxist view, but is the view of many feminists in the narrow sense who would no doubt denounce us for rejecting it as “class reductionists”.
If condemning sexism amongst socialists had been the aim of the motion why did it not explicitly say so? If it had, it would have been carried unanimously.
My guess is that the aim of those who proposed it was to try to attract “feminists” in a much narrower sense than your definition (of anyone, man or woman, who stands for equal treatment of men and women).
However, I don’t think that’s why most of those who voted for it did so. They probably shared your definition and/or were concerned about the gender imbalance in the party.
Yes. The more significant motion carried from 2019 Conference (overwhelmingly by 84 to 10) was this one:
This Conference rejects the definition of capitalism as “male-dominated class society” and the view that “capitalism and patriarchy are aspects of the same thing”.
Capitalism is based on the subordination of the working class to the capitalist class,which is not the same thing as the subordination of women to men. Conference further notes that the more advanced capitalism is the less the discrimination against women.The basic problem with that resolution (which is hopefully in the process of being rescinded) is that it does not define “feminism”.
This has allowed both sides of the argument to put their own interpretation on the term — you to mean simply standing for equal treatment of men and women ( which would mean that — a good thing — most people are “feminists” even if they don’t describe themselves as such, which many perhaps most don’t); comrade Marcos and many others in the party to mean anyone who calls themselves a feminist. Clearly not everybody who calls themselves a feminist can be a member of the Party even if they also call themselves “socialists” or “Marxists”.
It is all very well those who support the resolution saying that’s not what they mean but they should have said so explicitly in the motion.
So, if the resolution is not rescinded, another vote will be required to define what the word “feminism” means.
Robbo, you say that “men and women should be be treated equally and that sexism of any kind has absolutely no place in a revolutionary Socialist Party” and that that is the extent of your “feminism”. I could go along with that as long as that was the extent of what is meant by “feminism”. That would mean, as you point out, that a socialist must be be a feminist.
The trouble is that the motion proposed last year was badly drafted (“a person can be a socialist as well as a feminist”). This could mean simply that somebody who believes that men and women should be treated equally can be a socialist. Which is true; in fact if you don’t believe that then you can’t be a socialist. It also implies that someone who believes this doesn’t have to be a socialist. Which is also true; in fact most believe who believe this aren’t socialists but are either open supporters of capitalism or reformists.
But it is so badly drafted that it could seem to mean that a socialist has a choice of whether or not to be a feminist. Which is not true if feminism has the minimalist meaning that you say it has. As you point out, a socialist must be a feminist if feminism means simply standing for equal treatment of men and women. Everybody involved in this debate stands for that.
The motion can also be interpreted as saying that someone who is a feminist in some other sense (for instance someone who analyses society in terms of patriarchy rather than class or who believes that women should organise separately from men or who campaigns for reforms to try to achieve women’s equality within capitalism) can also be a socialist. Which is not true. And which is why it has aroused such strong feelings against it, especially as some in favour of the motion do accept and use the concept of “patriarchy” (which last year’s conference explicitly repudiated).
If the motion had simply said “ a person who stands for equal treatment of men and women can be a socialist” or “a person cannot be a socialist unless they stand for equal treatment of men and women” there’d have been no problem even if it was just stating the obvious.
If, as you say, that is all that it means it doesn’t matter which way the vote goes. If it is rescinded that changes nothing. If it is not rescinded that changes nothing. But if the aim is to avoid ambiguity it would be better that it gets rescinded and we can go back to the drawing board. Which could be in the course of happening as we speak. We will know by the end of the month.
Why are they calling Kamala Harris an “Afro-American”? She could equally be called an “Asian Indian American” as I notice some are saying she’s both. But they never called Obama both an “Afro-American” and a “White European American”.
What nonsense these “racial” classifications are ! Why not simply say she is a member of the human race.
John O’Neil deals specifically with the reform to capitalism that Wolff proposes;
”Within democratic co-operatives the conflict takes a different form as a conflict of interests amongst members of the institution depending on which of two different roles they play — as policy formulators for the institution or as recipients of wages. It is in such situations that the inaccurate and misleading term ‘self-exploitation’ appears appropriate. The conflict also reveals a way in which, when the workers are paying themselves low wages, this may not be a confusion as Carter claims. It is when workers find themselves forced by market demands to pay themselves low wages that the conflict of interest between workers in their different roles becomes most clearly apparent.”
Sorting through some old papers I came across this article from 1991 by an ex-member who still shared some of our views. It’s about whether the concept of “self-exploitation” makes sense in relation to workers co-operatives. He argues that while the term might not make sense in regard to workers exploiting themselves, it does in relation to the cooperative as a legal institution exploiting those who work in it.
Unfortunately only the abstract is can be read freely on line:
The key passage in his reply to Alan Carter is:
”This conflict of interests between the institutional employer and its employees remains a central feature of workers’ co-operatives within a market economy. […] The interests of the institution in increasing profitability in order to finance the investment programmes necessary for its survival — and, hence, in maximising the surplus product it extracted — conflicted with his interests as a wage-worker, in pay and conditions.”
Yes at the other end of the range, there was mention yesterday in the Party summer school on Technology of “smart fridges” which automatically re-order what you usually use when stocks run down:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_refrigerator
That can be useful in socialism too. In fact I assume that supermarkets already operate with such a stock control app. That shows that socialism can work too without money or price of course judt physical amounts. If stocks run low a “smart distribution centre” will automatically order more.
What are we waiting for ?
In his own words his reformist programme in a nutshell:
“Majorities might, for example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism would disappear.”
They might vote that but it will be just as hard (or easy) to get them to vote to make the means of production the common property of society under democratic control with production and distribution directly for use and not for sale and profit. Such unrealistic and unworkable reforms to capitalism are a diversion from what needs to be done.
That book by James O’Neal The Workers in American History is online here:
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/inauthors/view?docId=VAC1311&brand=ia-books
Chapters 2 and 3 on white slavery and the white slave trade are real eye-openers and give the lie to those Irish historians who argue that indentured labour was relatively benign and did not amount to slavery.
From the Socialist Standard of July 1919;
The enclosure of the common lands in France, Germany, and England gave rise to a multitude of starving outcasts, some of whom turned their eyes toward the New World in the hope of finding an amelioration of their lot. These provided ready material for the kidnapper and emigration agent, who enticed them across the Atlantic and then sold them into a species of slavery (indentured service) even worse than the slavery of the blacks.
The records of the American white slave traffic exhibit an almost unbelievable barbarity. This traffic is fully discussed by James O’Neal in “The Workers in American History,” where the worst evils of Negro slavery are shown to be paralleled if not surpassed by the system of indentured service.
Of course, the followers of the “meek and lowly one” had to have a finger in the pie, and we read that—
The famous Whitfield, and the two Wesleys, visited America at this period (1743) and urged the expediency of allowing slavery. (Ludlow, p. 38.)
In his “Story of the Negro” Booker T. Washington points out that the white man sold his own people in America years before the first black slaver sailed into Jamestown, Virginia (1619).
In other words like we always said, the owning class is multinational, multiracial, multiethnic, multilinguistic, multireligious. So is the working class.
Therefore the working should organise on a class and not on any other basis; in fact should oppose any attempts either by the owning class or by elements within the working class to split them by “race”, “ethnicity”, nationality, language, religion, gender, etc.
Yes Frederick Douglass seems a good bloke.
The more you look into this the murkier it becomes. I didn’t know this for example:
I suppose it must be true.
