Newcastle’s International Women’s Day (IWD) march and rally had enthusiasm and hopeful energy, but the (unsurprising) dominance of the Labor Party, and a reformist feminist orientation, left much to be desired. Max J reports on the rally.
The fight for women’s liberation continues. March 9th saw Newcastle’s unionists, militants and reformists rally for the cause of women’s rights, though political demands were often weak and lent credence to the Labor Party’s project of an ‘inclusive capitalism’. The rally was attended by the usual line up: Labor Party, Greens, some trade unionists, Hunter Workers (the trades hall), and a small grouping of socialists (from the RCO, the Spartacist League, and some unaffiliated). The CPA’s skeleton crew also attended.
A split is forming, or at least is visible in the ‘feminist movement’ in Australia. There are right-wing feminists who want women to occupy positions of power over other women – this was initially reflected in the UK’s Margaret Thatcher and can be seen with many Liberal Party women. Labor has spawned a tradition of labourist feminists, some of whom emerge out of the trade union movement, but mainly are lower-case liberal feminists who view the feminist project as being equality under capitalism: women occupying the same social and political space as men. But unfortunately, capitalism doesn’t work like that. While we can demand til we’re blue in the face that women have equal pay, equal hours, etc to male workers, this amounts to very little without a fundamental shift in the economy and society.
Much of the political demands too were centered on the Labor-Green campaign to scaremonger over a Dutton administration. While Peter Dutton is a pretty staunch conservative, it is hard to imagine that a Dutton government would be any worse (or better, really) than the Scott Morrison government, and while Morrison ran a disaster regime, it was hardly the Fourth Reich.
Scaremongering and alarmism over a potential LNP victory at a time when awareness of the failure of the Labor Party to uphold their promises is a tried and true diversionary tactic used by many a reformist. It shows that in Australia, reformism is well and truly in distress. Lacking a genuine platform for change and desperate to remain in power, they kick up a panic in an appalling attempt to scare people into voting for them. Far from being unique to Labor and the Greens, even Socialist Alternative has fallen into this trap.
Communist demands for women’s liberation are (relatively) simple: we want to uproot the state and capital, and emancipate women from the dual-drudgery of domestic and industrial labour. Only a campaign of socialisation, shattering the bourgeois lifestyle enforced on the working class by the state and the capitalist class, can provide the social conditions necessary for women’s emancipation. Notably, while Labor and the Greens will call for gender equality and equal pay for men and women (fine demands on their own), they will not call for mass organisations of women workers, wages for housework (an old demand of a long gone feminist movement), full-time public works programs for women (to escape the informal and family business sector), or even self-defence organisations for women (as the Spartacist League demands in Mexico – guns for women!).
Although we have these demands, we are hardly positioned to push for them effectively. This is why it is increasingly important to win over workers of all kinds to a communist program (in particular women workers) and to communist organisations. Queensland comrades have attempted to do so via a communist women’s front (the launching of which was delayed by a cyclone). Communists support solid and serious demands for women – we just need to do more to make our case, and make it a bit better.
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