WOMEN'S LIBERATION AND Jo O'Brien, who is an editor of Socialist Woman, has just returned from a lecture tour in the U.S.A.
On Wednesday August 26th thousands of women demonstrated throughout America. They demonstrated around specific issues, but there is no doubt that their demands-equal opportunity for jobs and education; free abortion on demand; and free 24-hour child-care tacilities, community controlled-were demands put forward with the concept of Women's Liberation in mind, not women's rights. The chant, the slogan, the roar on that day was 'Women's Liberation".
To develop liberation it is necessary to have rights and equality first, but the dynamic of the Women's Movement is the understanding that women will find no satisfaction in sharing the position of men under Capitalism. Women are struggling for equality only because it is the first step to liberation. The Liberation Movement contains the assumption that women need to transcend their present condition under Capitalism. What is now developing is the understanding that to do this they have to transcend Capitalism.
Capitalism and the Family There is an absolutely logical relationship between Women's Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism. To understand this relationship we first have to recognise that the Women's Movement is basically a reaction against the Capitalist social structure which is based on socially enforced sexual exclusiveness and monogamy *Women are challenging their social role under Capitalism because safe female contraception has introduced a new contradiction. Contra- ception would appear to release women from the need to be sexually faithful, sexually abstemious before marriage, and to release them from the automatic acceptance of monogamy. Women in large numbers are attempting to live for the first time by values other than those which have been perpetuated by the Capitalist State and Church to justify monogamy and sexual exclusiveness. But' -women are not in fact released by contraception. Sexual exclusiveness and monogamy were instituted to perpetuate a specitic mode of production and this mode of production is still do absolutely intact in most parts of the world. Whilst ever this mode of production is unchanged, the present role of the Family will exist and the oppression of women will continue.
The important point is that women are led to an understanding of this by their definition of what they want. Women experience their oppression to a targe extent inrough the Family. They want to be free of the restrictions imposed upon them by their role in the Family. This leads them to a study of its nature and the reason for its existence. They find that their oppression is directly related to Capitalist economic organisation. They discover that the sexual faithfulness of women was instituted by Capitalists to ensure that they could pass on their property to their children. They realise that the Family was instituted to end communal responsibility for the individual, and as the means of the division of labour between male and female through which the Capitalist produc tion operates. Women are therefore moving to an understanding of the need for social change, because they are seeking not only equality but Freedom-and their definition of what they want poses the question, "Freedom from what?" Social Revolution The Women's Liberation Movement lays bare the distortion of human relations by Capitalism, particularly the most fundamental kind of human relations-male/female ones. It moves logically against Capitalist economics because it challenges the validity of the socially enforced Family unit, which exists as the only form of social organisation in our society and exists because of Capitalism. The Women's Movement strikes right at the heart of our social organisation. Because its concern is Liberation, its demands have revolutionary implications. Free abortion on demand and free communitycontrolled child-care centres are typical exampl examples. They imply State provision for personal needs; social responsibility for personal welfare; the control of a person's life by that person rather than values imposed by Church or State; and the destruction of the role of the Family in relation to production. These demands were not put forward by the American Women's Liberation Movement because the majority of the women in the Movement are conscious Socialists. They were adopted because they express the needs of all women today. They show that women are conscious of what they need to radically alter their social condition, and that the thing they need is a socialistic •philosophy as opposed to a Capitalistic one. Their demands are not for social revolutionbut they imply social revolution. Free abortion and free child care are realisable demands. But they will only be realised with a significant change in the structure of Capitalist society. and when they are realised they will bring about a significant alteration in our social organisation. Thousands of women fighting for these demands means thousands of women consciously fighting for social reorganisation and liberation from their present condition. And the more that women unconsciously fight for socialism, they more conscious they will become of its relevance to them.
Alienation Central to the Liberation Movement is a not as a symbol of self-protection against the male oppressor but as a means of coping with the violent abuse and degradation of the female sex by the male sex which is only one aspect of the absolute sense of alienation felt by the majority of people in that country. The men.
who approached me in the streets of New York, as they approach all women in the streets of New York, with words that were unbelievably loathsome and cruel, were expressing the savageness of an alienation that a Londoner, for example, could not comprehend. Women, who are so easily reviled, beaten, raped and murdered, have had the stink of alienation in their nostrils for long enough. It is very significant that a search for Liberation has been motivated not only by economic need, but also by disgust at the quality of human life and relations under Capitalism. The mass of women inside the Movement may not think in terms of "alienation", but they are the victims of it and they are arming against it.
If revolutionary socialist parties ignore this massive rejection of Capitalism by women, and fail to point out to them in a relevant way that it is Capitalism they are rejecting, then there will be important and tragic consequences.
The Role of Revolutionaries Women have defined themselves what they want and have defined the road that they will take. They are at the beginning of the road that ultimately leads to revolutionary socialism, but their movement along this road could be greatly helped by revolutionary parties recognising female oppression and indicating their support tor the Women's Liberation Movement. Women will reach a conscious revolutionary position that much quicker if conscious revolutionaries salute their struggle and point out what both groups have in common. If revolutionary socialist parties turn their backs on women, the point of the overthrow of Capitalism will never be reached. A revolutionary socialist movement which does not identify with the oppression of any and every social group is neither revolutionary nor socialist. If the revolutionary socialist movement lags much longer in identifying with the Liberation movement, the two will move forward but not in concert. Women will not identify with a political movement that does not acknowledge their oppression. It will not deserve their support and it will not get it. There will not, therefore, occur that mutual identification that must occur between numerous social groups and classes, and a revolutionary party, for the successful overthrow of Capitalism. Revolutionaries will have failed.
If revolutionaries are failing to understand the importance of the Women's Liberation movement, it is largely because they do not understand the relationship between Capitalism and the people who live under it. They will have failed to see that nearly all classes, groups and strata of our society, at some time or another, will find Capitalism unbearable, and that the rejection of the quality of life under Capitalism can be as huge a motivating force as economic stress. Women students, women from the professions, women from the middle and working classes are rejecting Capitalism inde pendent of any class movement because they are sick to the guts of the female role, the female stereotype, socially enforced marriage and numerous other distortions of human life projected by our society. It is simplistic to consider that only the working class will disaffect from Capitalism, and therefore that only workers have revolutionary potential.
And why should we be surprised? We know that every aspect of our life is crippled by this kind of social organisation and it is therefore only logical that more and more sections of the community will seek for an alternative. We are witnessing the growth of human consciousness and understanding, and the translation of this consciousness into action Consciousness-Raising "Consciousness" is the fundamental link between Women's Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism. It is very significant that the basis of the Liberation Movement everywhere has been the consciousness-raising group. Women began with a recognition that they had to re think everything they were, and that was a brilliant beginning. They had to penetrate deep into what they had been made, and if they did not like what they had been made then they had to make themselves. They decided that they could alter their own consciousness and with a re-altered consciousness they could change their lives because they could affect the orga nisation of their society When at least 25,000 women demonstrated in the centre of New York, it was a triumph for the concept of consciousness-raising. Women organised the march, led it and addressed it. It was militant but controlled, without demagogues but organised. The women bore with endless patience the abuse of male onlookers and the deliberate disruption by the Press. Their call to the thousands of onlookers was "Women -join us." When I gave them a message of solidarity from the Nottingham Socialist Women's Committee, a roar of triumph came from this mass of women-triumph because they were now sure that their movement was international and strong. On the 26th of August American sisters gave great evidence of their contribution to their own future and to that of others A male, French revolutionary, who had previously protested that the Women's Liberation Movement was self-indulgent and a-political, went to watch the demonstration. •As thousands of women passed him and showed the meaning of the new female consciousness, he added, "Now I understand."
Jo O'Brien
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conscious disgust at the quality of life in our sogiety. Women in America are learning Karate,
Racial and religious groupings, age groups, and now a sex, are in the process of disaffecting.