working class hegemony to be about.
You dismiss the patriarchai relation and you disciss social relations WITHIN the family You are seat abour the effects of women's and banish the raising of consciousness from having any matenia place in politics, dismissing it to the seemingly flighty realms of ideology — which in your mode has Do materially.
As far as we can sce, son end up reducing the struggle around the family to a kind of antique bravado, a bli reminiscent of the family* rhetoric which thankfully sooms to have disappeared from the V LM's vocabularyYou say wothing that has got any strategic utility for a movement that has hugely refined Marxist theory about relations of reproduction sand theis councetion to class and the state, a movement that has shown the pepetration of state power into the bosort of the family And you have still less to say to most people who. naughty, naughty, happen to live in or were born into families. It's this sort of thing that drives mothers in the world and in Die WLM bonkers: Socialisin-Feminism and the WLM We snienth ay an incapably politica Feminism as an inescapahly politica conccot and not just "feminism plu: socialism. And because you have bo theory of autonomy, of an equal and democratic relatior between political forces, you have no way ol assimilating the WIM's political impact (and no amount of vanguardist flatters on WIM's behalf can aiter that).
All sou propose • the socialise-feminist current directing the WL's energy toward prablem, for you have no stratesy Post within Labour Movement. This typifies forthe Labour movement. Come on! You can 1 Fuse the socialist-feminist "vanguard" as the strument of your purchase on a labour movement from which you are isolated and which you long co lead.
What Is Our Position?
it is quite wrong to say that Conusunist feminists oppose the consalidation of the stand up, because feminists have joined the CP and bad effect, you present the party an crumbling sentimental giant indulging the fai maidens who ure doing their own thing Clearly, you have no iden about life in the CP. You seem unaware that since 1970 women have been one of the moos controversini and combative groups of people within the party And they have had effect, botb in terms o policy and the growing number of women's roups and committes, roet local to national Certainly, we baven't got all we want, either in terms of policy or active consmitment, we are the first to admit that and we always have. But a the sume time some progress bas been made The CP supports the WLM and its demands and is committed to fighting for women and agninst sexism, Our programme, the British Road to Socialism, does state that the condition of women is a central problem for socialism Your programme, The Transitional Progranune of the Fourt International, says nothing Inner Party Democracy You describe the Party as a burenncracy. with no internal democracy, a party in which we have not taken on the leadershup - well the Jendership would be the first to disagree with you:
You counterpase agains ritencies. Well. own, with its fractions and tendencies. our structure is not perfect, and a forthcoming commission will be the instrumen: of a debate on this within the party. The point is, however, That our debates are public and accessible, while yours are conducted within your own four walls. How can we estimate the effectiveness of your democratic machinery, when the outside world is not aliowed riccess to its political content?
Finally, we hope that this debate on socialist feminisen will heip to locate it firmly within the WL.M and that it — i.e. socialism-feminiam — will not fall prey to the wranglings of different left groups, into which it has dissolved in the past.
SOCIALIST CHALLENGE, 2 February, 1977 page B