The excerpt below, focusing on the question of affirmative action, is from a portion of a report by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes titled "New Stage of Revolutionary Working-Class Politics." It was adopted by the SWP National Committee on April 29, 1979. The entire report also appears in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics - Working- Class Politics and the Trade Unions, which is also on sale at a special discount. Communist Continuity and the Fight for Women's Liberation is copyright 1992 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Subheadings are by the Militant.

Key to the road forward is the transformation, the revolution, that is taking place as women in the labor force push their way into industry. This transformation began as one of the repercussions of the gains of the Black struggle. When the Civil Rights Act was being debated in Congress in 1964, the southern senators tried to prevent its passage by outlawing discrimination in employment on the basis of sex as well as race. They figured that made Title VII, as that clause of the act is known, so ridiculous, even northern liberals would have to vote against it. But it was passed.

This provided a legal opening for the affirmative-action drive by women. It gave women a legal club to use to force their way not just into jobs, but into basic industry, with its higher wages and greater unionization. Thousands of suits were filed. One stride forward came with the 1974 consent decree in the basic steel industry which established plant-wide seniority and set hiring goals for women and apprenticeship goals for women, Blacks, and Latinos. From 1975 to 1979, women made a big push into auto, mining, and steel.

Women get into industry
Jobs in industry are key to women for several reasons. One is that secretaries, teachers, and social workers simply do not have the raw power that industrial workers have when it comes to winning women's rights or anything else.

But it's more than that. Opening the doors to basic industry has a powerful impact on the consciousness and self- confidence of women, and on the way that men view their female co-workers. Many deeply ingrained attitudes change rapidly. The interconnections between the workers' struggle against class exploitation and women's struggle for economic independence and full equality come to life. Sexist prejudices begin to break down.

The women's movement needs to make the same kind of shift that is necessary for the Black and Chicano movements. To win the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment], abortion rights, and the other demands of women today will take a stronger, different kind of movement than a decade ago, with a different kind of leadership. But the forces exist to build such a movement.

Working women, and especially women in industry, have to lead this process, orienting the women's movement towards a strategic axis that can push the movement forward. This includes, of course, the fight against discrimination and harassment on the job. It's not sexual harassment only. The term is too narrow. The fight against sexual harassment is one aspect of the much broader fight of working women - the fight against the harassment of women as a sex, against discrimination, and for the right to get jobs, to hold them, and to have full rights on those jobs.

At the same time that working women need to become involved in the women's movement, they must also take their struggles into the unions, to win support for abortion rights, pregnancy benefits, the ERA, and other needs....

Affirmative action helps whole class
Affirmative action is vitally and directly in the interests of the working class as a class. Affirmative action is not a charity to make up for the past. It's not - as some argue - a morally correct position but materially disadvantageous to males and whites.

Workers are better able today to grasp aspects of the political economy of discrimination - that discrimination does not mean an extra buck for some workers at the expense of women or of Blacks, Chicanos, or Puerto Ricans; instead, it drags the whole class down in terms of real wages and job conditions, and saps the collective ability to fight back against the bosses.

More and more workers are waking up to their class interests, which do not lie in seeking privileges for some. As this happens, they become more capable of seeing the difference between class struggle and class collaboration, between themselves and the union bureaucrats. It becomes clear that it strengthens the union to bring in more Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and, yes, women, to make sure that everyone gets the same treatment.

There are more and more openings for us to explain and move forward along this axis of struggle.

But we must add the point we made in the March 30, 1979, Militant editorial: The kinds of struggles that established the principle of affirmative action will not be sufficient to defend or extend it. More powerful forces and a more conscious leadership are going to be necessary for that.

The Militant editorial noted that the civil rights laws were won without the unions really entering the fray. The editorial continued: "This is a new period, in which the capitalist economy is wracked by crisis; in which the employers are driven to harsher and harsher antilabor attacks in order to defend their profits. This is a period of polarization of class forces.

"The only class that has an interest in defending affirmative action is the working class. And the fight to defend affirmative action must be taken right to the center of the only mass organizations of the working class - the unions."  
 
 
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