Introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal of Gender Studies on Gender and Nationalism

 

This issue of the Journal takes up the problematic relationship between gender and nationalism. The ambiguity of this relationship derives mainly from the two-sided character of nationalism. The feminist struggle is one for liberation from gender oppression; to the extent that it stands aside from other struggles against oppression (bourgeois feminists who ignore class oppression, white feminists who ignore racism), it becomes limited and partial: that is, it fails to recognise the gendered ways in which racial and class oppression operate, and thereby accepts the oppression of some women. Similarly, foreign domination and ethnic oppression also affect women in specific ways, and a feminism which stands for the liberation of all women cannot be neutral: it has to take a stand against oppression and for liberation.

However, nationalism is not simply about liberation from foreign domination or ethnic oppression; indeed, this dimension is not even present in most forms of nationalism (British nationalism being an obvious example), whereas all forms of nationalism are about the establishment and perpetuation of state power – an inherently authoritarian and hierarchical institution – over a certain area of the earth’s surface. Where this is the only dimension in nationalism (where it is imperialist and racist, for example), there is no dilemma for feminists: they can unambiguously be opposed to it. It is when the liberationist element is also present that the problems arise. This is the grey area where a struggle may be against foreign domination or ethnic oppression but also may be fundamentalist or otherwise oppressive to women, or stand for its own form of ethnic oppression, or in other ways seek to establish a totalitarian state power. Where should feminists stand when the goals of nationalism diverge from those of feminism?

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.

Wage-Labour: The Production and Sale of the Commodity Labour-Power

 

Preface

This paper was first published in the Bulletin of the Communist Platform No.1, October 1977. The context in which it was researched and written was the period between 1974 and 1978, a period of intense debate and discussion within and between some of the socialist groups claiming a Marxist heritage in India. The one with which I was associated was the Revolutionary Bolshevik Circle (RBC) in Bombay, but I had major disagreements with it. One was the perspective of building a vanguard Leninist party, which, in practice, involved extremely sectarian and polemical interactions with other socialist groups. The idea that any of these groups – even the RBC, which undoubtedly took theory, the study of Marx, the legacy of the Russian revolution and a critique of Stalinism more seriously than any other group – could claim exclusive leadership of a socialist revolutionary movement seemed questionable. This was connected to a second criticism: designation of the industrial proletariat working in large-scale enterprises as the sole motor force of the revolution. One of the groups with whose members we were having discussions was working with agricultural labourers and the rural poor: mightn’t these sections too have to be involved in any revolutionary movement?

However, the criticism that preoccupied me most was that this perspective excluded the vast majority of proletarian women, only a tiny proportion of whom were employed in large-scale industry. I began working on a critique of this marginalisation of working-class women, drawing on two sources. One was a study of Marx’s writings on domestic labour, which seemed to be marked by inconsistencies and contradictions. The other was my own experience taking care of a household and two little pre-school children on a very small income: we had no washing machine or fridge; I cooked on a kerosene stove that often made pots and pans sooty; queued up at the ration shop for kerosene and inferior rice from which stones had to be picked out before cooking; used cloth nappies for my baby until he was toilet-trained; and although we had running water in our flat, the supply was limited to a few hours in the morning and an hour or two in the evening (and occasionally failed to come even at these times), so we had to store water in a drum for washing and bathing etc., and in a matka for drinking and cooking, and there were times when it ran short.

It was hard work, but working-class women living in urban shanty-towns and poor rural women had an incomparably harder time, queueing up to collect water from a common tap or well and carrying the heavy waterpots home; in some cases collecting firewood for cooking; collecting wheat from the ration shop, taking it to the mill to be ground, and making chapatis from the atta; cleaning made so much more difficult because there wasn’t a proper floor; and so on: all extremely heavy, time-consuming tasks.