BY
ALISON THORNE
The Socialist Alliance sought to identify areas of broad agreement in order to unite socialists from eight diverse socialist organisations, as well as many individual activists, around limited but shared goals.
The Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) presented its proposal to cease building itself in favour of operating as a tendency within Socialist Alliance as a big step forward toward left regroupment in Australia.
The Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) disagrees. Regroupment is something that may be achieved after a thorough process of discussion around program. Rather than being an effective vehicle for regroupment, the Socialist Alliance is the opposite. The goodwill on everyone's part, concentrating on areas of agreement in order to keep the alliance on track, mitigates against exploring programmatic differences.
The last 70 years are littered with examples of unprincipled combinations,
splits and purges. Devoid of an open, principled discussion of both differences
and agreement, the DSP's proposal risks throwing the historic Socialist
Alliance project onto the same scrapheap.
The centrality of feminism
The FSP is a Trotskyist feminist party both our Trotskyism and our feminism are non-negotiable. It's a key difference between ourselves and all other SA affiliates.
While it's true that the DSP also calls itself feminist, its conception of feminism is very different from our own revolutionary feminism. The DSP focuses narrowly on women's rights, rather than on how feminism is integral to revolutionary struggle. The DSP does not allow women within its own organisation to form a caucus, presumably because this is divisive.
However, organisations have disintegrated under the weight of internal sexism. The Black Panther Party in the USA was destroyed by rampant sexism. The Workers Revolutionary Party in Britain imploded as a result of a culture which tolerated women comrades being sexually abused. The right of oppressed groups to form caucuses is key to combating sexism, racism and homophobia which, because of the pressures of capitalist ideology, can manifest themselves in even the most revolutionary of organisations.
We consider that the struggle for women's complete equality lies at the heart of the class struggle and at the same time reaches out to women of all classes and races, attracting them to the banner of working class revolution. We also recognise that feminism has a dual nature. Like the struggle against racism, it is dialectically independent of and yet interwoven into the class struggle.
FSP leaders Clara Fraser and Susan Williams explained this in their essay Socialist Feminism: Where the Battle of the Sexes Resolves Itself. They say: The woman question has historically been indissolubly linked to the class struggle ... All women, regardless of class, are subjected to political, legal, cultural and economic discrimination, and this subjugation as an entire sex confers an independent character on woman's struggle.
The patriarchal capitalist class relies on women for the extraction of unpaid domestic labour and simultaneously exploits women as a vast pool of cheap labour ... the bourgeoisie can no more eradicate sexism than it can eliminate racism ... all wage exploitation would have to go in the bargain.
The terrible survival problems of women, therefore, can be solved only by fundamental change, and feminist demands lead logically and irresistibly toward the clear necessity for socialist revolution.
Our revolutionary feminism challenges the view that the real working class is the straight, white, male, blue-collar workers. There is a sociologically entrenched layer of highly paid, straight, white, male workers, who may fire up industrially to defend their own privileges, but whose political backwardness and lack of solidarity makes them an enormous social support to the capitalist class.
Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin described the conservative role of this layer in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. He said: it is quite possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum ... of bourgeoisified workers, or the 'labour aristocracy', who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their outlook ... are the agents of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real channels of reformism and chauvinism.
Clara Fraser concurs: white skin privilege, male chauvinism, and heterosexism
have turned millions of workers into lackeys of the boss, shorn of class
consciousness and permeated with elitism. This is the social base of the
labour bureaucracy. Feminism is not some optional add-on. Women's leadership
is key to the emancipation of humanity.
The role of the working class in global revolution
The theory of permanent revolution is another crucial political question distinguishing different tendencies within Socialist Alliance. In a 1982 article in the Freedom Socialist newspaper, Murry Weiss and Robert Crisman succinctly defined the idea: Permanent revolution is the process of worldwide, uninterrupted, and uninterruptible struggle of all oppressed people, led by the proletariat, for economic, social and political liberation.
Permanent revolution describes how, inevitably, all of the tasks of revolution both democratic and socialist, fall to the working class. Why? Because in the era of imperialism, the capitalist class is neither willing nor able to fulfil basic democratic demands. This is in contrast to the formalistic position, best exemplified by Stalinism, that first it is necessary to have a democratic, capitalist revolution and then, at some unspecified time in the future, the working class will be in a position to make a socialist revolution. Because the DSP uses a version of this scheme, we consider it to have some of the features of Stalinism in its program.
Revolutions do not unfold according to a pre-ordained plan. Just weeks after the democratic revolution of February, 1917, Lenin repudiated such a scheme, calling on the workers to challenge the provisional government and raising the demand, All power to the soviets! Six months later, backward Russia made a socialist revolution!
Of course, the Russian Revolution was defeated, although it took 74 years for capitalism to do it. Yet, this, too, validates permanent revolution. The flip side of a Stalinist staged theory of revolution is that there can be socialism in one country. The fact that the Soviet workers state is no longer there gives the lie to that dead-end ideology.
The question of permanent revolution is just as relevant today. The example of Indonesia shows why. Tossed together by imperialism from the remnants of various colonial empires, the oppressed nationalities of Indonesia were subjugated by brutal military rule from Jakarta. When the people finally overthrew the dictator Suharto, the country started to fall apart.
Indonesian capitalist rule has manifestly failed to fulfil most of the democratic tasks, such as national unity, emancipation of the peasants and universal suffrage. Now only a socialist revolution, led by the united working class of all the nations of the archipelago, can fulfil these tasks, and solve the national liberation struggles without starving the Javanese of food and resources. A revolution aided and supported by the working class of the region's core capitalist country Australia.
Capitalism and its failures are global. The working class in all its
diversity is the revolutionary class and only it has the political experience
and the social weight to end misery for once and for all. Without stopping
to comply with some artificial plan about how it's done.
Dissolve? No thanks!
The FSP believes that these revolutionary feminist ideas represent the program required to emancipate humanity. Do the other affiliates in Socialist Alliance agree? No.
So, should the FSP ditch revolutionary feminism and join those who are satisfied with the demands of women and queers being viewed as optional extras defined merely as questions of democratic rights? Again, no!
But does this mean that we can't work with other socialists with whom we have disagreements on these fundamental questions? Of course we can work together!
We have been working and will continue to work together around the very important agreed goals and objectives of the Socialist Alliance. But let us not mistake what we have achieved impressive as it is as the precursor for revolutionary regroupment.
The FSP will proudly continue building our international tendency with no apologies. We invite Socialist Alliance members and everybody else interested to talk more about revolutionary feminism to check us out. If you agree with us join! And then work with us inside the Socialist Alliance to continue forging an active, democratic and diverse united front which is the much-needed bold and vibrant socialist voice for working people.
[Alison Thorne is a member of the Socialist Alliance national executive and the Melbourne organiser of the Freedom Socialist Party, one of five parties affiliated to the Socialist Alliance. This is an abridged version of an article published in the Summer/Autumn edition of Freedom Socialist Bulletin. A reply by the Democratic Socialist Party will appear in the next issue of Green Left Weekly. More discussion about the future of the Socialist Alliance is available at <http://www.socialist-alliance.org/debate.shtml>.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 19, 2003.
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