WIGAN Pier Revisited, by Bea Campbell is an important book. There are now two fundamentally opposed strands of thought in the women's movement. bell leads one of them.
This current argues that the women's movement should abandon 'childish, leftist' ideas fighting the ruling class, and that advancing the interests of women centres on persuading the ruling to take money 'privileges' from working class men and redistribute them women.
The second strand argues that women's interests will only be advanced at the expense of the ruling class and that women must therefore fight, with or without men, against the ruling class to achieve their just demands.
This current argues that this struggle can coincide with the interests of the broader movement to the degree that the labour movement is forced to learn that it cannot win alone; that it must champion the struggles of all the oppressed.
In this article JANE KELLY explains what is wrong with Bea Campbell's ideas.
BEA Campbell's work articulates a legitimate frustration experienced by women, with the workings of the labour movement. encing oi our voices, the exclusion of our demands, dominated practices, all these she opposes. At the same time she provides a left-feminist cover for her co-thinker and fellow communist, ( Eric Hobsbawm, Marxism Today's project of the creation of an anti-Thatcher alliance-commonly known as a popular front, classic Stalinist compromise with the bourgeoisie.
How does she balance these apparently contradictory and incompatible aims, earth does she get away with it?
By using the language of feminism, but blurring the important distinctions between radical and feminist ideas, she confuses the identity of the enemy. She gives priority to the fight against the male trade union and labour movement but ignores, on all but a few occasions, fight against capital. She therefore the fight for women's rights within the labour movement alone, instead of both there and in the class struggle.
of to The silmalethe on socialist the larger guised retreat into popular frontism project, the pessimism and popular front politics.
A debate on her work Is, tererore of great importance. First because she uced represents part of a retreat from the feminist demands of the '60s and '70s in the face of Thatcher's attacks, a retreat that is evident not just in the politics of Marxism Today and sections of the LCC, but is also visible in the recent work of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. Important secondly because it is, at the same time, a disof the the Euro-communist wing of the British Communist Party. And although the majority of Labour and trade union leaders deny any interest in such a formation by Frank Field and an SDP peer of the openly coalitionist Rainbow Circle is existence or such The pessimism which underlies this project also informs Bea Campbell's recent book Wigan Pier Revisited, an attempt to rewrite Orwell from a constance. miners is especially both of her wrong analysis of the period and of the way she misuses feminism to back up her reformist class struggle blames the 'political settlement between men and women which 'prod historic compromise capital which closed their socialist imagination' (page 229).
And her pessimism leads her into positions which are just plain wrong. With false gloom she claims that last year's vote in the NUM against fighting for more pay and to save pits confirmed the suspicion that gone are the old ways of fighting the class war that we've all been raised on and still have power to excite me' rhetoric of the rallies had a kind of doom about them'. She then uses the collapse of the NHS strike in '82, in fact sold out by a leadership unprepared to fight, as proof that the long war... can't be won the miner's way' (pages 114-5).
True While it is true that real changes will not be brought about by purely economic struggles, that the divide between trade union and political organisation, the product of labourism, will have to be overcome if we are to move forward, it is clear now that with the right leadership, as in the miners' strike, it is possible to fight 'the old way', and in so doing to change the balance of forces truth is that she, like her friends around Marxism Today, oppose class struggle. She can't allow that it is the forward, because it contradicts their analysis of the period and also cuts across their reformist project.
What is more, her position renders her silent on what the women in these same mining communities have been up to. These 'immigrants in their own communities' (page 98) have not only backed up the militancy of the strike and have often been firmer than th mes in supporting it, but hare gone way beyond what they theresetres thought they conid do: organising romes's marches, speaking tours and support groups, joining the women at Greenham Common. Yes, the mining women have been inspired by the exwith ample of the Greenham women, but the point is that they have both recognised that the miners' fight is their fighttics of the strike-both have recognised that if the miners win all progressive demands will move forward.
Both the actions of the Greenham women and the mining women are visible proof of the gains made by the ...'the Campbell is right to point out that in the second half of the '70s 'the economic conditions demands' (page 63) evaporated, she leaves out the real gains won and not conceded, both at a ideological level. The defeat of Corrie in the face of the huge, feminist campaign to protect which forced the TUC for the very first time to back a fight for women's rights: the fact that despite Thatcher's attempt to force women out of work and back into the home, this has not happened.
Lost than men during the recession but they have clung on to employment, part-time and low paid, because they The know what it means to return to the home. The right to work, the right to control fertility, the right to meet together without men, fight against sexual harassment, these are gains which have been won as a result of the women's movement and have come to millions of women who may not see themselves as feminists but who nonetheless agree with the demands.
The problem for women who dis. like Bea Campbell's pessimism, and who disagree with ber sniping at the Laboer left from the sidelines, is that without a theory of the oppression of romes in a mate-dominated, capitalternative.
Engels women We must reproduction understood by when now.
Photo: VAL Bea Campbell redistribution workers'. -however 'masculine' the tacWhile we for its (WLM)
another. political and abortion rights, recognise Women have lost their jobs faster the right to women there is no coherent Virago £4.50 naivety of Bea Campbell's call for 'conversations' (pseudo-feminist for alliances), and call instead for socialist feminists to fight for power inside the labour movement, without returning to the theories of Marx and on class, and working to develop ideas on the oppression of within that framework, WVC will not be able to defeat the reformist ideas of Campbell and her ilk.
The recognition of the political nature of personal life has been a major achievement of the women's movement in the last 20 years. It has had a real impact on the lives, both public and private, of many women and men; but in and of itself, it is not enough. To develop a set of demands and tactics on how to achieve them, place the oppression of women within the broader framework of the relations of production and class analysis. Such an analysis will recognise that the sexual division of labour into unequal parts is one element in a system of production and which can only be using the tools i of Marxist analysis.
Despite the weaknesses in the work of Marx and Engels on the oppression women, their writings on the subject is where we have to start from. To understand the role of the family women's position within it Engels' book on The Origin of the Familiy cannot be overlooked. The relationship between the development of the fami v and the state as a resull of economic and productive relations, the transformation of the family as a productive unit during the industrial revolution, the recognition that the employment of women I outside the home was in the long term progressive—none of this can be overlooked we formulate our demands That Bea Campbell works outside this framework is evident when we look at her demand for a 'feminist incomes policy. This seeks to re structure the family income, to redistribute labour and wealth within the family, among working people and 'last but not least, there must be a employers to This last is simply a sop-last and not at all, is what it really means. It is a pay policy which transfers income within the working class, between the sexes, instead of from the bourgeoisie to the working class. It is the policy of the right wing of the trade union and labour Party bureaucracy. not prog ressive or feminist. It is upside down:
not overcome the divisions within the working class by taking group giving It is an analysis which plays into the hands of both the right wing and like the alikeboth argue against positive action for oppressed groups as divisive, neither that these divisions already there fostered and cultivated by the ruling class and used against us. Both positions are wrong: we must support the organisation of oppresser not in order that they may fight their own class but so that the whole class can fight the real enemy.
So Bea Campbell's project is to manipulate the understandable antag. onisms that women feel towards the labour movement, in order to reorient feminists away trom fighting in the trade unions and Labour Party for & voice. It is interesting that her own party, the Communist Party, (guilt of some of the worst practices sexism in the movement) is ignored i ner trade: precisely because aer ow roject is linked in to the popal their own ends--ends which will be a much opposed to the interest
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interests of the working cases i Wigan Pier Revisited