Freedom Socialist • Vol. 28, No. 6 • December 2007-January 2008

Permanent Revolution and Women's Emancipation

Guadalajara City, Mexico: protesters from many nations rally against femicide in Ciudad Juárez. Credit: Guillermo Arias/AP

"Permanent Revolution and Women's Emancipation," excerpted below, was written by Murry Weiss in 1978 for a left regroupment conference including the Freedom Socialist Party. Subsequently expanded, it is a remarkable Marxist feminist manifesto written by one of Trotskyism's cofounders in the U.S., a man of great heart, vision, and talents who joined FSP before his death in 1981.

The complete piece, including sections on the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and the role of women relative to cautious misleaders in the labor and other movements, is part of a Red Banner Reader featuring two additional articles by Weiss on women and socialism. To order the pamphlet, send $6.00 (includes $1.00 shipping) to Red Letter Press, 4710 University Way NE, Suite 100, Seattle, WA 98105, or order online at www.RedLetterPress.org.

Women under capitalism

Permanent Revolution is the process of worldwide, uninterrupted, and uninterruptible struggle of all oppressed people, led by the proletariat, for economic, social and political liberation. Its main tenets are:

1. The unfinished bourgeois-democratic tasks of humanity can only be carried through by proletarian socialist revolution. This is the gist of the theory.

2. Revolution does not stop at the proletarian dictatorship but continues as political clashes in the cultural, social, and economic spheres throughout each successive stage on the way to classless society.

3. Permanent Revolution is international in character and scope. The objectives of national liberation and democratic struggles in all countries are indissolubly bound up with the success of proletarian revolution in the advanced industrialized countries.

These three laws of social development are interrelated and they outline and illuminate the shape, tasks, and perspectives of world revolution in our era.

Permanent Revolution today takes aim at the capitalist state, its institutions, and the vast interlocking system of human and social relations that form the matrix of world bourgeois oppression. It recognizes the proletariat as the motor force of world economy and the strategic spearhead of international revolution. And it bases itself on the mutual interdependence of the proletarian struggle and all other liberation movements.

No democratic struggle today is older, deeper, or wider-reaching than that waged by women.

Everyone, except blatant male chauvinists, agrees that women in every strata - oppressed nationalities, the peasantry, the working class, the middle class, and even some from the ruling class - are conducting an uninterrupted, permanent struggle for equality.

Women are the oppressed of the oppressed: unpaid domestic slave laborers, breeding machines for capitalist factories and armies, the bulk of industry's reserve labor, and primary victims of the sexism that divides and paralyzes the proletariat and the world's liberation movements.

Age-old sexual and familial constraints on women remain the central life-supports to the established order. Not for an instant can capitalism survive real liberation for women. Nor can any reforms accommodate the aspirations for true equality of a total sex!

Consequently, women's emancipation depends on the forward march of Permanent Revolution and its impending victory over the profit system. The reverse is equally true: Permanent Revolution will grind to a halt without the momentum of women's accelerating struggle for equality.

Women's massive entry into the modern proletariat, their continuing existence as the most oppressed within each repressed sector, their age-old common affliction as women - and their demonstrated will to fight it - have conjoined today to make female fighters the radicalizing, unifying leaders of world anti-capitalist struggle.

The women of February

In grappling with the problems of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky and Lenin extended and enriched the theory of Permanent Revolution, which had first been formulated by Marx.

The February and October revolutions in 1917 provided stunning verification of the theory of Permanent Revolution. They demonstrated conclusively that for all backward countries the road to democracy passes into the dictatorship of the proletariat. The struggle of every stratum of the oppressed in these nations can only be resolved through socialist revolution.

What is not often recognized is that women's emergence into leadership of the proletariat during the 1917 uprising not only proved crucial to the Bolsheviks' victory but previewed the role women would come to play in contemporary labor and liberation struggles.

Five short days in February were all it took for workers in the streets of Petrograd to win the masses to their side and tumble the monarchy forever.

Astonishingly, the Bolsheviks furnished no leadership in those opening days. Lenin and Trotsky were in exile, and the timing, scope, and magnitude of the insurrection caught the party totally unprepared.

Who, then, led the workers' overthrow of the monarchy? Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution provides us with an answer: worker-Bolsheviks educated and trained for this moment by the party of Lenin.

But what were the inner connections and interactions among the different layers of Petrograd workers? Who among the proletariat took the decisive leadership?

The History illuminates the events and dynamics of February and enables us to recognize those forces that drove the revolution into high gear.

The 23rd of February was International Women's Day. … Not a single organization called for strikes on that day. What is more, even a Bolshevik organization, and a most militant one - the Vyborg borough committee, all workers - was opposing strikes … any strike would threaten to turn into an open fight. But since the committee thought the time unripe for militant action … they decided not to call for strikes but to prepare for revolutionary action at some indefinite time in the future.

How far even the Bolsheviks lagged behind events! But the revolution waits for no man. Nor do revolutionary women!

On the following morning, however, in spite of all directives, the women textile workers went on strike, and sent delegates to the metal workers with an appeal for support.

"With reluctance," writes Kayurov, "the Bolsheviks agreed, they were followed by the workers - Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries."

What is evident, Trotsky notes, is that "the February revolution was begun from below … the initiative being taken of their own accord by the most oppressed women textile workers." [Emphasis added.]

The February insurrection was not a "spontaneous" outbreak, as portrayed by superficial historians. A conscious act of revolutionary initiative by Bolshevik women workers touched off the entire train of events.

The Vyborg women prepared the moment. They developed the closest, most sensitive contact with the metal workers and other workers. They drew to themselves women of all sectors and classes. They consulted in daily and hourly caucuses, and dared to weigh the party's directives against their own superior sense of the situation.

When the time was right, they struck. And they brought the other worker-leaders along with them.

The Bolsheviks, faced with this consummate boldness, reluctantly agreed to join them. Thus was the entire class brought in on the action.

Then the problem loomed of what to do next. Trotsky quotes Kayurov: "Once there is a mass strike, one must call everybody into the streets and take the lead." The leaders were now face to face with the problem of how to win the soldiers to the side of the insurrection.

Trotsky offers the following account of the boldness that tipped the balance in favor of the revolution:

About 90,000 workers, men and women, were on strike that day. … The movement began in the Vyborg district with its large industrial establishment; thence it crossed over to the Petersburg side. … A mass of women, not all of them workers, flocked to the municipal duma [council] demanding bread. … Red banners appeared in different parts of the city, and inscriptions showed that the workers wanted bread, but neither autocracy nor war. Women's day passed successfully; with enthusiasm and without victims. But what it concealed within itself, no one guessed even by nightfall.

No one? Not quite. The women, "among them, no doubt, many soldiers' wives," had guessed and now matched strength with the soldiers.

A great role is played by women workers in relations between the workers and the soldiers. They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: "Put down your bayonets - join us!" The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up his mind first, and the bayonets rise above the shoulders of the advancing crowd. The barrier is opened, a joyous and grateful "Harrah!" shakes the air.

The revolutionary statesmanship of the women textile workers was remarkable.

1. They seized the initiative and acted as the highest conscious force in the February insurrection.

Their special viewpoint, formed from their independent and collective experience as women workers, enabled them to discount the directives of leaders who lagged far behind the onrush of events.

And their decisiveness won over the rest of the leading cadre and welded them into a cohesive force.

2. They attracted women from all strata and classes and involved them in revolutionary action.

The immediate issue that sparked the insurrection was bread. This issue soon became extended to and linked with issues of the highest revolutionary order: an end to war and the overthrow of autocracy.

3. On the decisive question of winning over the soldiers, the women were the primary agents of victory.

When the soldiers were sent to crush the workers, the women went up to them and the soldiers refrained from direct conflict. The strike thereby gained courage and enthusiasm, and broadened into outright insurrection.

The vanguard stance of these women was neither an isolated occurrence nor an accident. The lessons of those days, and their meaning and inference for the future, have gone too long ignored.

Return of the first revolutionaries

Women led the earliest revolution: the vast leap in productivity caused by advances in agriculture, domestication of animals, tools, medicine, and the arts. This revolution engendered the communal ownership of property and its derivatives: freedom and equality.

But women's leadership was overthrown by the inexorable encroachment of surplus wealth and accrual of private property. The first surplus was in cattle, and herds were in the hands of men who used them in trade relations with other tribes. Barter grew into buying and selling, and cattle became the money economy. A new economic, social, and sexual imperative arose that conflicted with the matrilineal communal tribal system and overthrew it.

Men, the owners of the new wealth, became the first owning class and women the first oppressed class, the earliest harbinger of the modern proletariat. That's why Frederick Engels called the sex struggle the earliest class struggle. The degradation of women is intertwined with and basic to all class societies.

The true herstory of women was submerged as class society took painful root in the world, marked by fierce female resistance every step of the way. The general exclusion of women from power prevailed until the 19th century, when the internal convulsions of bourgeois society and the rise of the industrial proletariat began to rip at the entire fabric of human oppression.

Women took the leadership of suffragist, abolitionist, and workingclass struggles throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. But all too often their interests were subsumed or sacrificed to the "larger," "central" struggles; the explosive power of feminism was rarely accorded the respect and recognition it deserved.

And it still isn't. A significant portion of the Left today refuses to come to terms with women's emancipation as the connecting link and detonator of proletarian, race, and national liberation struggles.

But the composition of the world proletariat has changed since WWII. Women now compose a staggering 45-50 percent of the working class in all imperialist countries, and their numbers have skyrocketed in colonial countries.

A global liberation network has formed, calling due all the unpaid bills from long ages of unresolved oppression, and women are threaded throughout this network. The newly arisen feminine linkage between the proletariat and all other struggles is enormous.

All the oppressed must eventually turn toward proletarian leadership and socialist revolution as a solution to their otherwise insoluble problems. The problem of problems, however, is the crisis of leadership within the working class.

Rising from the depths of every democratic struggle, insistently acting as a spur and a model, women are truly the unacknowledged leadership of the proletariat today, despite the sneers and disbelief of the Left chauvinists!

Our assessment leads to an unavoidable conclusion: the solution to the revolutionary leadership crisis is wholly dependent upon and inseparable from the struggle for women's emancipation. Moreover, the great changes taking place among revolutionary women are breeding corollary changes in revolutionary parties.

This is as it must be! Trotskyism hails these changes in the impact of women, and bases itself upon them.

The hidden question

Since World War II, Permanent Revolution has struck deeply and boldly inside the imperialist heartland in new and unexpected ways, and in advance of the long-delayed proletarian overthrow itself.

Fierce liberation struggles on issues of sex, race, sexuality, and human relations exploded in the industrial countries. The attendant social, familial, and moral upheavals, which even Trotsky tended to regard as matters for post-capitalist society, battered again and again at the rotten hulk of bourgeois society.

And these sex and race fights swiftly infiltrated and integrated themselves with the proletarian struggle, becoming in fact its motor force (to the dismay of Stalinists and sexist radicals everywhere).

Permanent Revolution, and the Trotskyist dictum that within its framework the most oppressed would rise from the depths to become the backbone of workers' and colonial struggles, provides the key to understanding the contours and dynamics of world revolution in our era.

An entire new generation of Marxists is awakening to the fact that Permanent Revolution is inextricably linked to the question of women's liberation.

Permanent Revolution has often been confounded and ignored. It bursts into clear view only at the highest point of a revolution. Similarly, women's emancipation is only now starting to be seen as key to contemporary politics.

Feminism - women's all-encompassing struggle for equality - is hardly a new reality. More than half the human race has been engaged for millennia in a passionate war to throw off the shackles of humiliation, super-exploitation, and grimly institutionalized exclusion from every significant area of leadership and decision-making.

Again and again this majority of the human race has arisen to attack the pre-historic crime of male supremacy.

The byword is audacity

Revolution in the U.S. means nothing less than the overthrow and dismantling of the mightiest, richest, most advanced, and most horrendously destructive imperialist power in history.

Women impel the proletariat and the social movements. They continually exhibit an unmatched audacity, more audacity, and still more audacity!

They will unleash an incalculable revolutionary power which will bolster and inspire the working class to defeat the union bureaucrats and destroy the imperialist butchers who sponsor them.

Revolutionaries of both sexes and all skin colors and nations, with the sense and sensibility to link up with the most downtrodden of our age, will together forge a mighty socialist feminist party.

This is the promise that crowns the present reality and foretells the paramount role in Permanent Revolution enacted by women who dare.