> >>> jplst15+ at pitt.edu 04/13/01 09:24PM >>>
>Charles Brown writes:
>
> >CB: So your responses to the women's equality
> > statement is "girls just want to have fun " ?
>
>Um, no, Charles. The pamphlet I was referencing is sixty years old. I
>haven't said anything about the CPUSA's Women's Equality Conference of 2001.
>
>((((((((((
>
>CB: I know you were referencing something from the 1930's. I think I have
>read it before.
>
>Anyway, on the pamphlet from the 1930's , I like the effort to synthesize
>dialectical materialism and teenage concerns from the 1930's. Same
>problem exists today. In other words, I disagree with your mocking the
>1930's pamphlet.
>
>Although appealing to youth is an important issue then and now, your
>comment gets off the subject of making a better synthesis of Marxism and
>feminism in the year 2001.
Considering that most party political youth wings must have quite a bit to do with sex and socialisation, I thought the YCL 1930's pamphlet was quite witty.
But no-one seems to have commented on what I feared was a rather provocative interpretation - at least for red-blooded sectarian socialists - that the feminist agenda has to be incorporated into a revolutionary perspective by seeing a wider role for the struggle for all form of democratic rights..
On these lists you only establish something when you find somewhat surprisingly that you are not shot down in flames. And even then you do not really know. But it seems to me that there is a solid argument going back to Lenin about the importance of the struggle for democratic rights as part of an agenda perhaps stretching over several decades, which is socialist in ultimate content.
My particular proposal for how to conceptualise this is that democratic rights are inevitably posed at first in capitalist society as bourgeois democratic rights. Any attempt to deepen these into real rights that are accessible to the mass of working people, requires us to go beyond narrow bourgeois right, and to extend rights in their social and organic context. That requires making inroads into the private ownwership of the means of production.
Biggest chestnut is how women can have equality of wages in a market in which all workers have to sell their labour power. This equal right is in fact unequal for the female sex because women play a disproportionate role in the reproduction of the human species outside the sphere of commodity exchange. Their availability and their careers as sellers of their labour power are therefore disadvantaged.
My not necessarily so reformist solution is positive tax credits (which would thereby would start to modify the role of workers as mere sellers of labour power).
But first the US will have to overcome its demagogic opposition to "big government".
Chris Burford
London
BTW I am interested that the CPUSA has a mailing list. But that raises the question of whether the party, or at least the mailing list, is a vanguard one. Presumably the mailing list is not, but if it is moderated, idle harassment can at least be obstructed.