When the bosses go on a stepped-up offensive to shift the relationship of forces in their favor, they play every card in the deck - war and the threat of military aggression abroad; more naked use of the cops and courts at home (whether against Blacks, immigrant workers, farmers, or strikers); massive cuts in social services; tax hikes; union busting and concession contracts. At the same time, they wage a political campaign to justify their course as being in the interests of "all of us." They talk about "equality of sacrifice," the "national interest," "labor-management cooperation," and "common cultural values."

...The attack on women's rights is fundamental to the success of the capitalist offensive. Discrimination against women is one of the most important ways in which the rulers work to deepen divisions within the working class. Its acceptance helps the bosses keep the labor movement shackled to a narrow trade union perspective, instead of thinking in broader social terms and acting politically to advance the interests of the oppressed and exploited....

The employers aim to undermine working-class women's consciousness of themselves as workers, as part of the working class, and instead to heighten their consciousness of themselves as women - not in the feminist sense, but in all the retrograde ways that are drummed into women from childhood. The employing class seeks to reinforce the prejudices about women's proper place and domestic role. It seeks to convince women that they want to be dependent on a man, with the second-class status that entails....

The capitalists' offensive against women's rights is not aimed at driving women out of the work force. That is historically precluded.... The goal is not to push women out of the labor market but to push them down to jobs with fewer paid holidays, more piece work, less safety, shorter lunch breaks, less union protection, and lower wages. Women have always made up an important component of the pool of unemployed workers that Marx called the industrial reserve army of labor. This reserve army never disappears under capitalism, even in the best of times. But in a period of capitalist stagnation such as we have lived through over the last decade, the owners of capital need to expand this army of the unemployed in order to intensify competition among workers and thus drive down wages....

The bosses' ideological campaign seeks to reinforce the idea among both sexes that women are "natural" recruits to this reserve army. They are "normally" only marginal workers, temporary workers, part-time workers, home workers. Women are only a " second" wage earner in the family.... This propaganda is aimed at convincing women to accept, with less resistance and resentment, temporary unemployment, or new jobs at lower wages....

Decline of the women's movement
The counteroffensive to roll back the gains women have made has been registered in a decline of the women's movement. Since 1977 the National Organization for Women (NOW) has been turned more and more into an electoralist appendage of the capitalist two-party system.... The fact remains that there has been no mass, fighting women's movement in the streets or anywhere else for some years. The kind of mass-action movement from which women gain self- confidence as they fight to change things that vitally affect their lives; the kind of action movement through which women learn how to mobilize millions to fight for their rights that kind of movement does not exist today. The women's liberation forces are on the defensive, not the offensive.

This situation is not unique to the United States. It is a phenomenon that, to varying degrees, marks virtually all capitalist countries where the women's liberation movement had a significant impact in the 1970s.... It is one of the fruits of the incapacity of the labor officialdom to mount an effective fight back against the capitalist austerity drive that began with the 1974-75 worldwide recession. Prospects for advancing the fight for women's liberation are not independent of the historic course of the working-class movement, even if women's rights battles can and do surge ahead on occasion - as they did in the early 1970s - and help show the way forward....

Women in industry
Women who are full-time industrial workers and part of the organized labor movement are in the best position to resist the conservatizing pressures that all women are subjected to by the economic, political, and ideological offensive of the ruling class. The reason is simple. The fundamental line of division, of deepening cleavage, is a class polarization. Not all women - and not all women who work - are hit by the offensive with equal force and in the same ways. Not only the economic squeeze, but also the necessity to fight back weigh more heavily on working-class women. The reactionary ideological and political offensive of the employers has less fertile ground in which to take root in the working class in general than among middle-class layers.

Women who are industrial workers and union members have a degree of self-confidence that comes from knowing that they can sell their labor power and survive. They are not so economically dependent on a man, and this gives them a greater element of independence in making important decisions that affect their lives. Moreover, they have acquired at least the beginning of working-class consciousness through understanding that they have a better chance at improving wages and working conditions by joining together with fellow workers to defend themselves against the employer....

While women who are industrial workers are less susceptible to right-wing demagogy and reactionary "solutions" to their problems, however, they are nonetheless not immune. They are constantly fighting the bosses' attempts to convince them and their male co-workers that they are not really workers; that being part of the labor force is only a passing moment in women's lives; that the really important thing for them is that they will leave the labor force to raise a family; or that, having already left the labor market to raise a family, they are now past their prime, and should be glad to find a boss "willing" to employ them.

This kind of reactionary propaganda - in a period of working-class political retreat - affects even the most politically conscious women and men. That is why it is helpful to look back at the 1950s and learn from history.... It helps in understanding some of the pressures today, and arms us to deal with them more, consciously.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home