Women and the Class Struggle

  

Preface

This report was published in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform, No.2, June–September 1978, and is an attempt to present the discussions of two socialist feminist workshops held in Bombay (a smaller, more theoretical Marxist discussion from 3 to 5 July, and a bigger discussion including a larger number of women activists from 6 to 8 July) in a coherent manner. It therefore involves some selectiveness in what is reported and what is not, which undoubtedly was influenced by our own standpoint.

We may not now agree with every word we wrote then, but looking back at it after a period of more than 40 years, one thing that strikes us is our prescience in identifying sexual assault as a major issue, and in attempting to accommodate it within a revolutionary socialist perspective. A new wave of the Indian women’s movement emerged after the Supreme Court in 1979 reversed a decision of the Bombay High Court and acquitted two policemen accused of raping a minor Adivasi (indigenous) girl, Mathura. Autonomous feminist groups were formed and erupted in protest up and down the country, and they continued to organise on various issues, particularly violence against women, with large-scale protest actions, sustained campaigns in support of victims, demands for legal action against perpetrators, and proposals for reformulation of patriarchal laws. We were involved in the earliest groups, the ‘Forum Against Rape’ – later renamed the ‘Forum Against Oppression of Women’ – in Bombay, and Stree Sangharsh and Saheli in Delhi. These groups were broadly socialist, but independent of political parties, including left parties.

However, this mass upsurge of women after the Supreme Court decision in the Mathura rape case also showed how short-sighted we had been at the time of our workshops in opining that large-scale feminist struggles might not arise in India. The Indian women’s movement surged ahead in subsequent decades, along with an upsurge in movements based on identity politics. 

Wage-Labour: Trade Unions and the Struggle to Determine the Value of Labour-Power

Preface

This article was published in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform No.2, June–September 1978, as a contribution to an ongoing discussion on trade unions that was being conducted in the Platform Group. We read and discussed Marx on trade unions and their role in determining the value and price of labour power, in converting workers from atomised individuals to an organised force, and in creating the conditions for more human relationships in the family as well as a more healthy and educated working class. Among many other texts, we read Vladimir Akimov’s A Short History of the Social Democratic Movement in Russia 1904/5 and The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1904), and fully agreed with his critique of Lenin’s assertion in What Is To Be Done that ‘Spontaneous development of the labour movement leads precisely to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. The spontaneous labour movement is trade-unionism, it is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei (mere trade-unionism), and trade-unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie’. We read and discussed Franz Neumann’s European Trade Unionism and Politics, in which he notes the link between the triumph of democracy and the recognition of trade unions, and the inherently two-fold aim of the unions ‘not only to secure high wages and decent conditions of work for the worker but also to win for him a new social and political status,’ which is why unions have to be destroyed under fascism.

The practical outcome of these discussions in Bombay was what we called a ‘workers’ inquiry’ into the existing condition of the working class, and the formation of the Union Research Group (URG). We moved widely around Bombay and its surrounding areas meeting worker-unionists in factories and offices, bringing out a Bulletin of Trade Union Research and Information for them, and organising workshops and conferences in which the specific problems they faced and possible responses were discussed. Two of us, with help from other women activists, also conducted research into the condition of working-class women who were not employed in large-scale industry, and tried to help them to work out strategies to tackle the numerous difficulties they faced.