INTERNATIONAL TROTSKYIST REVIEW #1 -  Resolution on International Work Among Women

RESOLUTION ON
INTERNATIONAL WORK AMONG WOMEN

Adopted by the Founding Conference of the
International Trotskyist Committee
26 July 1984

Women's Oppression

Throughout history, women have been oppressed in every class society. From earlier forms of class society capitalism inherited a number of forms of social organization—especially the family—which had always been used to subjugate women. The nuclear family which exists under capitalism is an adaptation of the ancient patriarchal family into a form best suited to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Women are exploited under capitalism as workers and oppressed by the sexual division of labor in the family. As workers, most women work in the lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs. Capitalists use them as a "reserve labor force," hiring them into production when more workers are needed and laying them off when production slows down. In addition, women are oppressed by their role in the nuclear family, upon which capitalism depends to reproduce the working class. Women provide unpaid labor for household services, child care, and nurturance for the family. In order to force women into a subordinate role in the work force and in the family, capitalism devalues women and subjects them to discrimination and sexism.

All women are oppressed by the sexism of capitalist society. But there are class differences in that oppression. The majority of women in the world do not have paying jobs, must perform unpaid labor within the family, and have neither economic nor social independence. Working-class women are oppressed not only by sexism and the sexist division of labor in the family but also by their role in production as workers. They are a critical part of the only consistently revolutionary class.

In advanced capitalist countries, black, Asian, Latino, and other minority women are oppressed by the racism promoted under capitalism. As working women, they are forced into the lowest-paid jobs. They are often solely responsible for their families' survival under conditions of high unemployment, low incomes, lack of adequate health care and social services, and racist harassment and terror.

Lesbians, who challenge the nuclear family by offering alternative ways of living and developing relationships, are harassed and discriminated against under capitalism. Lesbian workers can be fired, laid off, or denied better jobs when they are openly gay. Lesbian mothers fight against a bigoted judicial system for themselves and their children.

The majority of women in the world live in neocolonial countries. Women in neocolonial countries are severely oppressed by the capitalists and landowners in their own countries and by imperialist domination. Severely exploited as workers, they struggle to keep their families alive against starvation, lack of health care and social services, and brutality. Many of them are peasants whose families barely eke out a subsistence living under capitalist and imperialist exploitation. In many of the neocolonial countries—for example, some of the Islamic countries—women are oppressed by especially reactionary laws, religious traditions, and customs which regulate many aspects of human behavior, almost eliminating women's personal freedom.

Women in Stalinist countries are told that they live under "socialism." The lack of workers democracy and the continuance of women's subordinate role in the nuclear family prove this is not true.

The Importance of Work among Women

The goal of revolutionary socialist organizations, including the international organization, is to lead the working class in the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Women, who comprise at least half of the workers and oppressed of the world, must be mobilized to participate in this struggle in order for victory to be possible.

Owing to their particular isolation and their historical oppression, many women are conditioned to accept unconsciously their assigned role and its consequences. Revolutionaries must understand this situation and consistently fight for women's liberation in order to win the majority of women to the side of the workers' revolution.

Exploited as workers and oppressed by the nuclear family under capitalism, women potentially can play a leading role in revolutionary struggles. Women have played an important and militant role in trade union and revolutionary struggles throughout history. In the liberation struggles of the colonial and neocolonial countries, women have fought valiantly against brutal repression. Lenin considered the role of women in the Russian Revolution of 1917 crucial to the victory of the proletariat. In a discussion with Clara Zetkin on the importance of building international work among women, he stated:

In Petrograd, here in Moscow, and in other cities and industrial centers, proletarian women showed up splendidly during the revolution. We would not have won without them, or hardly. That is my opinion. (Clara Zetkin, "My Recollections of Lenin," in Lenin, The Emancipation of Women, New York: International Publishers, 1972, p. 98)

If women are not won over to revolutionary politics, the working class will be unable to complete its task.

Stressing the importance of organizing women, Lenin stated:

There can be no socialist revolution unless very many working women take a big part in it....

... The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much women take part in it. ("Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women," November 1918, in Lenin, The Emancipation of Women, pp. 59-60)

Later, in the Transitional Program, Trotsky reiterated this in the context of the tasks of the Fourth International:

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the woman worker. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class, consequently among the women workers. ("The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International," in Trotsky, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution, 3rd ed., New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977, p. 151)

The importance of work among women with a focus on winning women to a revolutionary working-class perspective was put forward by the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee in "The Transitional Program in Today's Class Struggle." Focusing primarily on the intervention of revolutionaries in the radical women's movement, the document emphasizes the need for this work to maintain a working-class perspective:

Only in this way can revolutionaries develop the potential strength of working-class women and train the most advanced elements for leading positions within the class struggle and the revolutionary party itself ("The Transitional Program in Today's Class Struggle," adopted by TILC December 1979; in The Basic Documents of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee, part 1, Founding Programmatic Documents of TILC, Detroit: Revolutionary Workers League/US, 1984, p. 39)

In "The Programmatic Principles of the International Trotskyist Committee," the ITC emphasizes the importance of intervening in the organized movements of the oppressed with a transitional program.

Trotskyists intervene in every mass movement which has an anticapitalist content; not only those which are exclusively or largely proletarian, but also those which stem from the mobilization of other classes oppressed by capitalism or specially oppressed sectors (peasants, women, gays, students, oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups, the disabled, antiwar movements, antifascist struggles, etc.). Trotskyists intervene in all mass movements on the basis of the Transitional Program and its method. So, starting from the level of consciousness and the demands of the masses, they identify those general transitional demands which allow them to center the activity of objectively anticapitalist movements on the perspective of overthrowing capitalism and establishing proletarian power. ("The Programmatic Principles of the International Trotskyist Committee," adopted July 1984, section 12)

In order to end women's oppression, capitalism must be overthrown internationally and socialism established on a world scale. Unlike capitalism, socialism does not depend on the oppression of women in order to sustain its own existence. Therefore, socialism can provide the economic basis to end women's oppression, if concrete steps are taken by the most conscious workers to bring women into production and to replace the nuclear family. During the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition from capitalism to socialism, the proletariat must lay the foundation to end women's oppression. If women are not already leaders in the struggles of the working class and participating in those struggles on a wide scale, ending women's oppression even under the proletarian dictatorship will be all but impossible.

ITC Work among Women

With the intention of rebuilding a democratic-centralist Fourth International, the International Trotskyist Committee expects to provide leadership to the working class on an international scale. Recognizing the importance of work among women to this task, the ITC is committed to work among women and to the development of women as leaders in its work. In order to consolidate work among women as part of the perspectives of the ITC, all sections of the ITC agree to begin the following:

1. Each section will analyze its current work among women, including work among women in the trade unions and among unorganized women workers; organizing working-class women in their communities; participation in workers' parties; and interventions in the women's movement, the lesbian/gay movement, and the organizations of blacks and other minorities. Each section will analyze its work regarding concrete organizing and recruitment, and the resources presently allocated to this work.

2. Each section will develop concrete written perspectives for work among women which provide short-term and long-term goals for its work. The resources needed to develop this work will be freed up over a reasonable period of time.

3. Each section will take the necessary steps to consolidate and expand its overall work among women. Each section will consider the effectiveness of its interventions in the trade unions, strike support, and organizing unorganized women workers. Organizing working-class women in their communities around issues of particular concern to women, such as welfare rights, housing, child care, health care, schools, etc., will be concretized. Each section will consider its interventions in unions and in workers' parties and plan how to raise issues and support struggles of concern to women. Perspectives for work among women in the women's movement, the lesbian/gay movement, and organizations of blacks and other minorities will be determined, with a focus on winning sections of these movements to a working-class perspective. In all of its work among women, each ITC section will raise transitional demands and other political issues to win women to revolutionary politics.

4. Each section will take responsibility for planning research on women's issues; the history of women in the trade union movement, the socialist movement, and the women's movement; and the theory of women's oppression. The leadership of each section will encourage and support this research and subsequent writing on these issues.

5. Each section will analyze its newspaper coverage of women's oppression and work among women and will take concrete steps to provide consistent coverage of issues regarding women in its particular country and internationally.

6. Each section will look critically at its current recruitment of women and will take concrete steps to recruit more women over the course of the next time period. The goal of each section will be to raise its number of women members to at least 50 percent of the total membership. To help achieve both this aim and the development of women's leadership, the ITC will recognize that it is essential for each section as a whole to take responsibility to assure child care and to develop among all its members a consciousness of the requirements of effective child care.

7. Each section will analyze its development of women's leadership and will take the necessary steps to provide the political education, experience, and support necessary to develop women leaders, theoretically and practically, in work among women and in all other aspects of their work. In this regard, each section will also work to ensure that the development of any partner, parent, or child active in the organization is not carried out at the political, emotional, or financial expense of any other family member active in the organization.

8. Each section will take the necessary steps to provide political education on the woman question for its comrades.

9. Sections in the neocolonial countries will intervene in the national liberation struggles to organize women and to emphasize the importance of the woman question to national liberation and workers' revolution.

10. Each section will provide copies of its perspectives for work among women, as outlined in this resolution, for all other ITC sections within one year after this resolution has been adopted.

11. Each section will exchange documents, organizing materials, etc., on its work among women with the other ITC sections.

The ITC will further develop guidelines for work among women in Stalinist countries when sections from those countries become members of the ITC.

The goal of the ITC, when possible, will be to form an international women's commission to develop international perspectives on work among women and to coordinate that work internationally.

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