From the Ashes of the Old Century, A Better World’s in Birth . By Andrea Bauer. (64 pp. $4.50 from Red Letter Press, 409 Maynard Ave. S., Suite 201, Seattle, WA 98104, USA.)
This is the Political Resolution adopted by the 1999 convention of a US trotskyist organisation called the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP).
I’m not sure which “better world” the title of this pamphlet is referring to, but it is certainly not planet Earth. This is a world where the state capitalist dictatorships of the Soviet bloc were “workers states” and “. . . societies in which the profit system had been overthrown and production and distribution were organized essentially in the interest of working people”. A world where “nationalization of the credit system” is a socialist demand. A world where the working class must be led and directed by “trained, dedicated revolutionaries” rather than rely on our own conscious actions. Most unbelievably of all, a world where workers “. . . respond with anger and pressure, not cynicism and apathy, when the Second Internationalists (Labour and Social Democratic parties) fail to act as their representatives”.
Its somewhat upsetting that the FSP styles itself as a “socialist, feminist” organisation. An organisation which regards itself as feminist while defending state capitalist regimes as “workers states” should ask itself some questions. As a system of society in which the FSP claim the profit system had been overthrown we should expect women to have liberated themselves from the shit capitalism throws (disproportionately) on them. Was this really the case though? Not quite:
“. . . women in Eastern Europe lived under a system of formal, legislated equality. Women had the legal right to work, and most barriers to women’s employment were lifted. Mandated equality, however, is not the same as freedom. Women were not given a choice of lifestyle, but were obligated to work. Since “equality” was imposed by the state, there was no public dialogue about the changes in women’s roles, and sexism and discrimination persisted, both in the public and domestic spheres. Women were still expected to do all of the child rearing and housework, for example, while working the same hours as men.”
In Romania, women were required to bear four, and then later five, children; many died from illegal abortions, or were allowed to bleed to death if they refused to reveal the names of illegal abortionists. (http://civnet.org/journal/issue3/cfbeco.htm)
Life for working class women in the state capitalist/”communist” states was a life not a million miles away from that of a working class woman in the openly capitalist “west”. What sort of liberation is offered by the “workers states” which the FSP see as a model for socialism if we are just going to continue being wage slaves and women are going to continue to be crushed by the burdens of a patriarchal class society?
Even the high percentage of women in national legislatures and public office in eastern bloc countries relative to the west is deceptive when comparison is made with percentages of women in the Party bureaucracy:
“In the bodies which did have real power—the communist parties’ central committees, for instance—there were almost no women” (http://www.oska.org.pl/english/womeninpoland/perpectives/2.html).
Just like the western states these “workers’ states” were systems of minority-class economic, political and social domination, with male authority figures at the top. That women are suffering disproportionately in the changeover period following the collapse of the eastern state capitalist bloc and losing many of what gains were won under state capitalism is an argument for abolishing the capitalist system altogether, not going “back to the future” to a “workers’ paradise” that never existed.
Ben Malcolm
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