Letter – Women Workers

Following discussions with a member of the SPGB, I perceive a contradiction in the Party’s approach to the struggle to bring socialism.

The Party acknowledges and encourages the struggle of all workers to win higher standards of work and life, although the ultimate goal of workers must be the abolition of wage labour. Many things stand in their way. For women workers, in particular, enforced childbearing has been the single greatest barrier in their fight for better employment, better education and leisure. Why then has the Standard been silent on the struggle of women to achieve this particular revolution in the quality of their life and work to win free contraception and abortion on demand?

Your lack of interest in this workers’ movement (as confirmed by a three-year avoidance of this or any other issue important specifically to women in the Standard) suggests that you either deny or do not understand its centrality. If either is the case, then the SPGB must lose credibility with women workers who fight to build socialism in their own lives.

But perhaps I have been misled by your spokesperson.

Verna Smith (London WC1)

Reply
You rightly point out that the Socialist Standard has not dealt with free contraception or abortion on demand (except for a general article on the women’s movement in the November 1978 issue) for the past three years, but it is something which will be analysed in a forthcoming issue. Regrettable though this absence (not avoidance) is, we claim that the basic message of our journal — the abolition of the wages system — is the ‘central issue’ for all workers.

Our aim is free access to all that society produces; socialism will obviously make available means of contraception and abortion. But we do not support campaigns to ‘demand’ these. To do so would attract support from non-socialists people interested in reforming capitalism rather than abolishing it. In any case what you must ask yourself is whether these are realisable aims under capitalism. Suppose these services are provided — a possibility, since it would be in capitalism’s long term economic interest despite the initial costs. Do you think they would be any more adequate than the other inadequate ‘free’ health services which allow people to die waiting for them? Or do you think they would remain immutable rights at times, such as now, when the inevitable crises of capitalism force governments, of whatever name, to introduce cuts in ‘social’ or ‘health’ services?

Since capitalism operates only on the basis of providing goods and services according to cost/profit considerations, surely it is capitalism which is the ‘single greatest barrier’ to women workers — as well as to men. The removal of this barrier should be the immediate goal of all of us.

Editors.