SDS and Women's Liberation

Students for a Democratic Society needs a clear, accurate class analysis of the special oppression of women and a Marxist program for women's liberation.

The existing women's liberation movement, both liberal and radical, seems to see sex as the basic "class-division" in society. This low level of theoretical development means an opportunity for Marxists to intervene with a working-class line. However we will render our intervention useless if we cling to an oversimplified analysis that the only from of oppression is class oppression and confine our interest to the economic superexploitation of women workers.

The class question is the decisive issue in class society. However, other additional types of oppression do exit as well—e.g., racial oppression, national oppression, women's oppression.

The SDS resolution passed by the June convention did not provide a correct analysis or program.

Oppression and the Family

The June resolution included the following atem 'The family does not have to be primarily reactionary We should attempt to attack the bourgeois aspect and make the family a unit for fighting the ruling class."

This statement is flatly wrong. It ignores, in a crude anti-theoretical manner, the entire thrust of the Marxian critique of the 'amily in order to accept as potentially revolutionary an institution which is inherently reactionary. The family can no more become a unit for fighting capitalism than can racial segregation, which is also a bourgeois institution. Both of these socio-economic institutions are oppressive and help maintain the capitalist system. Both are tools by which the ruling class maintains and strengthens false conciousness in the working class.

As a pro-working-class student organisation, SDS must provide a Marxian class analysis of the social oppression of women. The primary source document for this analysis is The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, in which Frederick Engels traces the history of the increasing oppression of women through the various stages of economic development of society, showing that the appearance of private property brought with it the necessity of transferring this property through inheritance. From this flows the need to trace descent; and since the male, in the primitive division of labor, had come to be the property owner, he is therefore given the right to exclusive sexual access to the bearer of his children. Hencer the institution of marriage emerges.

Sexual divisions continue to be socially enforced, since they bolster the capitalist system. The social inferority of women is maintained by the entire structure of class society, including its ideologies. Many women internalize and come to believe the false ideas of class culture, and actually feel themselves to be inferior. Women today tend to be "under-achievers"; feeling rightly that there is not much future for them, they waste their talents and energies on trivialities, decide to live through their families or succumb to despair. It is our task to offer to these women a worthwhile goal: their own liberation, which cannot be a personal "self-liberation" but requires a socialist revolution and the withering away of the family.

This is far from advocating that straw man of the bosses' press, that under communism men and women will live in separate barracks and all children will be brought up in a state orphanage. We are rather advocating the replacement of marriage as a compulsory economic and with voluntary forms better suited to people's physical and emotional needs.

Family and Class

The resolution states: "With the rise of capitalism and modern industry, the economic foundation on which the traditional family was based was destroyed. Women were taken out of the home and put into the factory. But the special exploitation of women, who became a cheap reserve labour force, continued. To justify the double exploitation of women workers, the ruling class fostered the ideology of male chauvinism."

To set the record straight, at the very beginning of the industrial revolution women and children formed the bulk of the industrial proletariat. The reasons for this are well established. Women and children were cheap, unskilled, docile labor used by the rising capitalists to batter down the wages of men (usually more highly paid) and to destroy the craft industries employing (relatively) highly paid male artisans.

Consequently, workers with large families were often given preference by early capitalists who, as a matter of fact, often compelled the worker to require his entire family to work in his factory or lose his job.

The destruction of the traditional family by employing women and children in production creates the possiblity of founding the realtionship between the sexes on a new economic basis.

Indoctrination

The bourgeoisie and its theorists tinkered with the old institutions in order to fit them better into the new industrial capitalism. In the age of disintegrating feudalism, before the capitalists had accumlated much experience in running their own system, some of them even toyed with very radical ideas regarding the state, family and religion. They soon learned, however, that whether they themselves liked conventional family life or not, or whether they believed in God or not, the institutions of religion and the family were indispensable for inculcating the required docility, submissiveness, respect for authority and superstition in the working class. Without religion and the family the workers would be far more likely to become troublesome.

Although individual families were destroyed—and are being destroyed-by captialism, the family as an institution was not hurt, as it rises or falls with the existence of private property. When economic considerations permitted, the ruling class periodically initiated campaigns, through the media and churches, to get women back into the home. This tendency reached a peak of brutal chauvinism and cynical barbarism with the Nazi slogan, "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche", which portrays the woman deluded by religion and as breeder, babysitter and cook. "The family that prays together stays together": both religion and the family are bourgeois institutions of false consciousness.

The Family in Non-Capitalist States

The family serves its reactionary function not only in capitalist societies but also in the bureaucratically-deformed workers' states—i.e., Russia, China, and those other nations which have abolished the material basis of the family—private property—but which still require the family as a socio-cultural institution in order to suppress the consciousness of the masses, rendering them subservient to the parasitic bureaucracies headed by Brezhnev & Co., Mao, etc.

For example, the initial effect of the Chinese revolution—which in its need to fight imperialism found itself completing the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and establishing the property relations of a workers' state—was the unleashing of an immensely progressive social force. The feudal oppression of women was abolished. But in the absence of workers' democracy in China, policy is determined by the whim of the Maoist bureaucracy. Hence, the ambivalent attitude toward the family: thus the bureaucracy opposed birth control during the Great Leap forward; today they encourage long periods of celibacy for the Chinese youth.

No society could today be entirely free of the dark heritage of the family with its sexual oppression and shut-in, stultifying life for the children. What is the most repugnant to any revolutionist about family life in the deformed workers states, however is the fact that the political elite ruling these societies presents the survival of an archaic and reactionary institution as a great achievement in building socialism! The Bolsheviks in Lenin's time never glorified the family as an instrument-real or potential—for revolutionary socialist struggle and development. As far as the miserably insufficient level of Bussian economy and culture permitted, the passed laws and created institutions designed to free Soviet citizens, particularly the women and children, from the oppressive and stultifying influence of the family All this was of course reversed with the advent of Stalin's bureaucratic regime, which continues on to this day. After wiping out the left wing of the Communist Party and stripping the soviets of power, the Stalinized regime proceeded to make divorce more difficult, illegalized abertion enhanced parental authority and worst of all called this adaptation to brutal barefoot Russian medievalism—socialism!

SDS cannot wish, away the social and cultural significance of the family by words about making it "a unit for fighting the ruling class" Reactionary institution end.

The Working Woman

The economic aspects of the inferior position of women in our society provide the most immediate benefits to capitalism. Whenever capital needs to draw women out into the labor force, it has been able use the ideology of male superiority to justify the super-exploitation of women workers-that is, women being paid less for doing the same work as the men. After all, "a woman's place is in the home","a man has the responsibility of supporting a family, a woman only works because she wants to".

The assumption is that the woman's main role is that of the tender mother hence, she is forced to take care of her children, even if they are unwanted, even when she is divorced. Any woman who wants more out of life is termed "unnatural" or "unfit". The lie is pushed that women are fit only for domestic chores and that therefore their labor is not worth as much as the labor of men.

Militancy or Passivity?

In the months ahead, many SDS members expect to have jobs, either full-time or temporary, in factories, on campus, in offices and hospitals, wherever labor struggles are going on. Those of us involved in assisting striking unions will be able to establish contacts with workers on the picket lines. As socialists, we must support the working class in its struggles and seek to raise consciousness, pointing out that male chauvinism divides the workers, that lower wages for women means lower wages for everyone. In Britain, where unions have calculated that wages would increase 11% if women received the same pay as men, equal pay for equal work has become a major union demand. In the U.S., a related process of awakening is going on.

Male chauvinism has made many women workers passive in accepting their lower wages and generally poorer working conditions. Many women are convinced that it isn't "ladylike" or "feminine" to be really militant, that political activity is only for men, that the picket line is too dangerous a place for women. These attitudes serve the bosses and must be fought. Radicals should encourage militancy among women workers and relate women's oppression to the oppression and alienation that all workers experience under capitalism. Thus, women's liberation has an important role to play.

Male Chauvinism in the Student Movement

Male chauvinism—perhaps a misleading term since it tends to obscure the fact that women's male chauvinist attitudes can oppress them or other women—has hurt the radical movement Many potentially radical women are unwilling to join an organisation which they believe is indifferent to women's oppression.

The student movement is infected with male chauvinism, a bourgeois ideology, as is the rest of society under capitalism. Long ago most of us faced up to our own deeply embedded racist attitudes and began to conquer them. Now we must root out our male chauvinsim as carefully. Here we are dealing with the social and psychological forms of discrimination rather than the economic aspects of male chauvinism. We must recognise also that no one—including our women members—is automatically exempt from male chauvinist attitudes. We must, by scrupulous attention to the content of a pro-women's liberation position, prevent the subject from becoming a bandwagon which intimidates free political debata in SDS the way that some Black hustlers have sought to racist-bait other radicals into accepting their positions as gospel.

Program

When SDS members make a political entry into a special group such as a women's liberation group, they should be armed with a program that raises the consciousness by relating specific felt needs to the broader struggle for socialism. We carry through this program by raising a series of transitional demands—that is, demands which flow from the specific struggle but which lead the struggle to a higher level of militancy and political sophistication.

We move that SDS accept the following program for struggle and agitate around the following demands.

Abolition of abortion laws; each woman must be free to make her own decisions.

Free abortions, as part of demand for free quality medical care for everybody, so poor women will have the same freedom of choice as middle-class women.

Freely available birth control devices and information.

Free full-time child-care facilities for all children, the expenses to be borne by the employer or the state Free pre-natal, maternity and post-natal care with no loss in pay for time off.

Establishment of free voluntary cafetarias in the factories and other places of work.

Divorce at the request of either partner. Abolition of alimony. Expenses for children to be paid by the state.

Lower the legal age of adulthood to 16. State stipend for schooling or training for any child who wishes to leave home. Free education for all children, with housing, food and stipend. No loco parentis. Student-teacher-worker control of all schools and colleges.

Full and equal pay for equal work.

Equal work: equal access to all job categories. Shorter work week with no loss in pay ("30 for 40") to eliminate unemployment at the capitalists expense.

An end to all forms of discrimination—legal, political, social and cultural.

SDS should seek the creation of a non-exclusionist class-conscious women's liberation organization in which SDS members can participate and struggle on the basis of the above program. Toward this end, we should direct interested SDS members to seek to initiate, along with other radical women, a nationally orientated women's liberation publication.