PARTISAN!

Edith Fischer outlines a programmatic basis for a communist women’s movement.

The conditions of working women, particularly indigenous and immigrant women, are worse now than they have been for a generation: crushing inflation, underemployment, evictions, bills piling up. The re-organisation of economic life during and following the COVID lockdowns has placed immense burdens on working women – domestic labour has been intensified, under-employment of women has grown, and the movement of women into the workforce (a consistent development since the end of the Second World War) has now slowed. In both economic and social life, women are still dependent and exploited – in the home, in the workplace, and in bourgeois civil society. 

The long struggle for the emancipation of women, which began in the epoch of the bourgeois revolutions and reached its mature form in the epoch of the communist, proletarian revolution has stalled to the degree that the emancipation of women is still tied to the leadership of liberal feminists and those who provide political cover for them. The misleadership of the women’s movement by the liberals, by the professional middle classes, and by the trade union bureaucracy, has meant that the vast masses of working women have not been politicised or drawn into revolutionary activity. This is true in the advanced capitalist countries, and all the more true for the vast masses of the global periphery.

Communism is the material basis for the liberation of women. Only communism can socialise social reproduction and organise it on the basis of general need and the emancipation of labour. Only communism can institute the dictatorship of working women, which in fact is a feminist, communist dictatorship over reactionary patriarchal society and the patriarchal family. Only communism can end the generalised exploitation of labour, systematic exploitation and degradation of working women, and the general immiseration of the proletariat. As such, communists must take leadership in the women’s movement, and seek to win working women to the program of women’s liberation and socialism.

The task ahead for communist feminists is the organisation of a proletarian front in the women’s movement, and the agitation for a program of women’s liberation amongst workers more broadly. The women’s movement must be put on a fighting basis, with serious organisations and revolutionary demands. This development must go hand-in-hand with the reconstitution of a mass working class, socialist party.

Importantly, communists must also work to fuse the demands of the women’s movement with the demands of the struggle against imperialism. The language of “women’s rights and freedoms” now stands along with the “defence of the rights of small nations”, and “human rights and the Rules Based International Order” as premier justifications for imperialist adventures and strangulation of the international proletariat. Women’s liberation needs to be linked directly to the struggle to defeat the imperialists – alongside land reform and the seizure of power by the workers and peasants! In Australia, this means linking the struggle for women’s liberation to struggle to break the US-Australia Alliance, and for the defeat of Australian imperialism.

A preparatory step in the necessary direction will be the organisation of communist women’s groups to carry out specific agitation and propaganda work amongst working women and within the working class broadly. These groups can develop socialist cadres, especially amongst young working women and students, and put them in systematic contact with the wider struggles of the working class for peace, democracy, and freedom. These groups can prepare the basis for a reforging of a trade union women’s movement, and the birth of a fighting women’s liberation union. Most of all, the rebirth of the communist women’s movement must go alongside the rebirth of a mass socialist workers party in Australia and in the Asia-Pacific region.

Draw all working women into the struggle for women’s liberation and socialism!
No Unity with Liberalism! Break with the Bourgeois Feminists!
Build the Communist Women’s Movement!

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