Red Pepper » Feminism

After Beyond the Fragments

jenny — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 09:43:57 +0000

As Sheila Rowbotham says at the start of her original essay in Beyond the Fragments, it helps to say how you’ve entered a particular train of thought. I became involved in politics over a decade ago, through student activity. I was not really aware of feminist politics at my university, though studying history led me to read about the first wave feminist movement which sparked a wider interest in women’s history and in feminism.
Soon after university I was excited about the possibilities of getting further involved in politics, but didn’t find it easy. I went to a few feminist meetings, but liberal feminism was of little interest. I knew that Trotskyism was not for me; I liked the opportunity for learning that educational meetings provided, until I realised that anyone attending who did not agree with the party line was generally shouted down. Being put down by men, however, I found to be not limited to the Trotskyist left. I lacked confidence, found speaking in meetings difficult, and considered writing a leaflet or article to be beyond me.
Feminist Fightback showed more promise. I do not hold them up as a perfect organisation – far from it – but there are two main reasons why this is where I put my political energies (in addition my union branch). The first is that actions and discussions are underpinned by an understanding of gender, race and class as interconnected. The second is the importance placed in how we do politics, not just what we do.
‘That book’ and learning from history
People visiting our house sometimes look at the bookshelf and ask ‘why do you have so many copies of that same book?!’ ‘That book’ is the original Beyond the Fragments. The reason is that when a friend and I first read it a few years ago we bought almost all the copies available on Amazon because we thought it was important that other people of our political generation read it too.
Recent events in the Socialist Workers’ Party intensify the relevance of the book, particularly Sheila Rowbotham’s critique of Leninist forms of organisation. It’s certainly a historical document, a snapshot of the British left at a particular time, but is far from being a historical relic. As a new generation of feminists on the revolutionary left, learning from the history of our movement is crucial. We need political mentors. Though some groups today trace their political lineage elsewhere, or perhaps dwell exclusively in the present, for me personally, and in Feminist Fightback, the impact the Women’s Liberation Movement made on the British left is a foundational part of our own political heritage.
When I talk about learning from history, I don’t mean that you can find out all the answers (or perhaps any concrete answers at all) from a book like this one, but rather that reading the experiences of people involved in the movement at a different time can help to clarify your own thoughts, allowing you to connect with similar experiences across time, as well as the inevitable reflections on the significant differences in the contexts that different historical periods provide for doing politics.
Feminism as part of the class struggle
One theme that unites the three distinct essays in Beyond the Fragments is that of feminism as part of class struggle. This runs counter to academia’s subsequent theorising of ‘social movements’ such as feminism as being in opposition to ‘old-style’ class politics. It is also not the kind of feminism that we see represented in the mainstream press, on Women’s Hour, or in the bookshops. As Hilary Wainwright wrote in the original introduction, we might be able to organise in isolation if all the sources of exploitation and oppression we face were separate and unconnected to each other. But, she writes ‘it is precisely the connections between these sources of oppression, both through the state and through the organisation of production and culture, which makes such a piecemeal solution impossible.’
‘Our feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’
In Feminist Fightback we describe our approach to feminism as ‘intersectional’, meaning that we see all forms of oppression as interconnected. Solidarity between different struggles for liberation is an essential part of this, but the analysis goes further. The oppressions which all these groups face are structured by each other. Capitalism only works because it is racist and sexist. An intersectional approach looks at capitalism historically, seeing oppression on the basis of gender, race and class as being shaped by the violent transition to capitalism, and re-shaped with capitalism’s periodic restructuring of itself.
This perspective underpins our activism and how we approach the issues we work on. To give one example, one of the areas we have been working on throughout the life of the collective is ‘reproductive freedoms’. This perspective emerged in north America in the 1970s in response to campaigns for access to abortion which Women of Colour, socialist feminists and disabled feminists identified as frequently ignoring race, class and disability, for example not engaging with the huge issue of sterilisation abuse. Some campaigns even perpetuated racist and classist discourses, for example making arguments in support of abortion on the grounds that it was cost effective for limiting numbers of welfare recipients. Over the past few years, we have sought to situate the action we have taken for women’s access to free, safe and legal abortion in this broader perspective of reproductive freedoms – that is to think about what is necessary for women to make the choice of whether or not to have a child. This includes connecting with and participating in struggles around health care, childcare, sex and relationships education, immigration controls and welfare.
I think this intersectional approach to feminism is gaining some ground – attempts by former Tory MP Louise Mensch to pan it in The Guardian last week are one sign of that. The recent feminist occupation of The Women’s Library was significant in bringing together people of all genders who shared an explicitly ‘intersectional’ approach. The organising of the occupation brought together a group of feminists who had not worked together previously, and the occupation itself very many more. In the discussions there, I found it really interesting that there needed to be no argument over the structural connectedness of inequalities and oppressions and the way they are exacerbated by the austerity regime. Though the eviction cut discussions short, this seemed to be a given, and the term ‘intersectional’ was used repeatedly, particularly by younger feminists. ‘Our feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit’ was written on one of the banners hanging on the front of the library.
The politics is in the process
The occupation of the Women’s Library is also an example of an action where the importance of how we do politics was foregrounded from the start. Direct action can still be a pretty macho affair, and though the occupation involved people of all genders, the planning and the taking of the building was led by women. Meetings in the occupation were participatory, with decisions made by consensus. Working groups were formed to take on particular areas of work – and for once it wasn’t just women being responsible for food and cleaning.
The idea that the ‘politics is in the process’ has been foundational to the development of Feminist Fightback. Many of us in the collective had come into politics through student politics or the organised left – hierarchy, sectarianism and aggressive interventions were a part of that experience. Many of us shared anxieties and a lack of self confidence about our engagement in politics. Organising in a different way wasn’t a theoretical consideration; it was a necessity if we were to continue being involved.
Over the years we have moved towards more explicitly libertarian structures in our organising: making decisions by consensus, running participatory workshops, exploring radical pedagogical strategies, skill sharing, collective writing. This is an imperfect process, but I think these practices, and most importantly the emphasis we have put on care and trust within the collective, have helped in making politics something we enjoy doing rather than dread. Perhaps the most important thing I have gained from Beyond the Fragments is the confidence it gave me in asserting that it’s not just what we say and do, but how we say and do things that is crucial for movement building. Our political practice needs to prefigure in some way the changed social relationships for which we fight.
Engagement with ‘the state’
One thing that strikes me when I read the book is the difference in the context in which that fight is taking place. Reading Sheila and Hilary’s accounts of working in the Greater London Council before its dissolution in the early 1980s is a stark reminder of the changed nature of the state and of a very different view of society. As Sheila writes in the introduction to the new edition, the framework socialist feminism grew up in the 1970s was one where assumptions that society as a whole was partly responsible for the well-being of individuals, and that a greater degree of equality made for a better society, were widespread. These assumptions were, to quote Sheila, ‘the bed rock from which the idea of “going beyond” sprang’.
We live in different times. The original Beyond the Fragments references the change that was already underway – attacks on state welfare, privatisation of state services. The intensification and normalisation of such change is the context we live and struggle in today. It is hard to know how to start grappling with the question of engagement with ‘the state’. Against a background of growing cuts and privatisation in the late 1970s, Lynne argued that state services need to be defended, and that libertarians and feminists had been wrong to see the state as a monolith:
‘It’s no longer simply a question of the overthrowing of the state, but of a strategy which fights for an expansion and transformation of the services it provides – not necessarily in a centralised form.’ she wrote. In our struggles against cuts today, how can we make sure the fight isn’t just about defending existing and often unsatisfactory public services, but becomes a struggle for a better way to organise our society and our lives? Our struggles against austerity in our communities and in our workplaces (for workers in the public sector the two may be one and the same) need to involve a collective imagining of alternatives.
I think in a small way this has been useful in our organising: in campaigning against cuts to nurseries in Hackney and Children’s Centres in Tower Hamlets we have had a broader discussion about the form and organisation of childcare: how do we want children to be cared for? But getting funding by the state and having genuine community control, as with the nurseries and the Children’s Community Centre described in the original Beyond the Fragments – is a demand which seems like something of a now quite distant past.
At the same time, the libertarian idea of controlling our own institutions and supporting each other through mutual aid, has been effectively co-opted by neo-liberalism. In the UK this comes through the Big Society, with its plans for Free Schools, volunteer-run libraries and self-organised adult learning groups. Of course, such attempts threaten the jobs of workers in these workplaces, and are a way of cutting services. However, this perverted version of community autonomy is appealing to many precisely because of their dissatisfaction with the services they receive.
Feminism in the age of austerity
I don’t want to end on a note of pessimism. It’s exciting to be part of conversations where feminism is being discussed as part of a set of explicitly anti-capitalist politics. So much of media and academic representations of the so-called resurgence of young feminism focuses either on liberal feminist attempts to get more women running top companies, or cultural activism fixated on banning lap dancing clubs and pornography.
But, as I mentioned earlier with regards to The Women’s Library occupation, there is a hint that – on the ground – feminism which takes issues of gender, race and class seriously may be gaining in strength. This is possibly because of the onslaught of cuts, which makes this form of feminism not just a nice idea but something which speaks to the reality of women’s lives.
We’ve got a serious struggle ahead of us and we need to hold on tight to the history of our movement as a source of strength and guidance. But we are living in a new stage of capitalism and a much changed political landscape, which requires us to ask new questions and develop new ideas and modes of organising. I hope this discussion can be a part of that process.

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Back to the fragments

admin — Fri, 03 May 2013 08:08:16 +0000

‘Crisis? Blame the baby boomers, not the bankers.’ The economic analyst Anatole Kaletsky, writing in The Times at the start of 2010 with Irish banks on the point of collapse, was searching for scapegoats. ‘It’s all their fault,’ journalist Neil Boorman announced on the BBC home page a few months later, again denouncing ‘my generation’. Representing the new coalition government, David Willetts was fanning these media assaults via his book, The Pinch: How the baby- boomers took their children’s future – and why they should give it back. What fun! These public figures could combine their hatred of the ‘sixties’ generation with attacks on a group increasingly entitled to state benefits, now reaching retirement. As history is turned on its head, revisiting the past becomes a necessity.
What had we done, my post-war generation? Clearly, today many young people’s prospects are bleak, blocked by the austerity measures imposed by a government that has done nothing to lift Britain out of recession. However, to blame the post-war generation for the effects of the type of policies that a significant number of us fought hard against merely forecloses any useful analysis of the past or the present. It also undermines the efforts of those of my generation still trying to continue what we began, looking around for and sometimes finding younger voices to support, despite the platitudes of the moment that mock such efforts.
We certainly need to reflect upon whether more could have been done to prevent some of the worst outcomes of the present. But this has to begin with us wondering how best to remember and make use of the diverse and conflictual histories of political radicalism.
This brings me to the re-issue of Beyond the Fragments, more than a generation after it was first launched at the close of the 1970s. Back then, it was the women’s movement that exerted the strongest influence on my life, and that of its other authors, Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright, as well as most of my friends. Yet our feminism was never separate from attempts to make sense of the broader political landscape.
As all of Sheila Rowbotham’s writing carefully records, women’s liberation emerged directly out of the left, at the close of the 1960s. In Women, Resistance and Revolution (1972) she highlights the grand hopes of those days, a time when feminists not only hoped to try to encompass the struggles of women everywhere, but also to help provide a transformative vision for building a fairer, more egalitarian world, for people generally: ‘Women’s liberation brings to all of us a strength and audacity we have never before known.’ It did indeed.
For much of the 1970s, feminists were active on all fronts, organising for better conditions in the workplace, persuading any men in their lives to share in the joys and labour of childcare and housework, or campaigning to improve what then still felt like our own local ‘communities’. Wherever I looked, feminists were prominent in radical print shops and newspapers, setting up nurseries and playgroups, working in law centres, anti-racist campaigns, or targeting women’s needs specifically in creating and staffing battered women’s shelters, rape crisis centres, or joining campaigns such as the Working Women’s Charter or the National Abortion Campaign. Tasks and projects grew endlessly, alongside women’s vibrant cultural life recorded in magazines such as Spare Rib, or the new feminist publishers, especially Virago and the Women’s Press.
But the mood had darkened by the close of the 1970s. Faced with the imminent triumph of the right under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, the immediate problem, we thought, was how to draw upon feminist thought to help build socialism, creating stronger bonds of solidarity between the diverse activist and movement politics of the previous decade and the array of organised left groups of the time. Today, as vulnerable people everywhere are devastated by welfare cuts, we are in an even worse moment and the obstacles we face have grown formidably.
Direct action today
Yet the obstacles have not prevented resistance. In sudden flurries of activity, grass-roots dissent is back on the political agenda. Rebellion, occupations, civil disobedience, all returned in force some years ago. Some date it from the massive demonstration in Athens in 2008, or the Arab Spring beginning December 2010, soon followed by massive gatherings of Portuguese and Spanish Indignados, and further Greek street riots the same year as Occupy movements appeared in New York, London, Sydney, and other cities around the world, late 2011.
The most unexpected and instantly inspirational were the Arab insurrections in Tunisia and then the Egyptians in Tahrir Square. The sudden coming together of unemployed graduates, slum-dwellers, union activists, faith groups and feminists, were all at once projecting a host of new dissident voices around the world, many of them talented Arab women’s voices, demanding true democracy and a fairer share of their country’s resources, beyond any restrictions of gender, religion or class.
Over 800 protesters were killed and tens of thousands injured in Egypt alone, but their continuous acts of civil defiance quickly overthrew their dictatorial and corrupt ruler. What has followed is more troubling, as economic disorder and political confusion remain, with conservative forces and new elites emerging, supported by the military. Nevertheless, these uprisings helped to spur the resurgence of protest movements around the globe in the context of the continuing catastrophic effects of the financial crash of 2008.
Occupy Wall Street was thus only one of many rebellions in recent years, eager to reclaim the city, with excellent access to global resources for spreading the word that it is possible to imagine and practice ways of living differently. No sooner was the occupation in Zuccotti Park violently ejected than people set up camp in many other cities around the world.
In London, prevented from settling outside the London Stock Exchange, protesters pitched tents outside nearby St Paul’s cathedral, remaining there for seven months before facing eviction, with tents appearing, if increasingly sporadically, ever since. The goals of these protests were many, to expose corporate greed and social injustice, the lack of affordable housing, the influence of corporate lobbyists on government, as well as environmental pollution globally.
‘You can’t kill an idea’, was the viral message circulating globally at the height of the occupations. The idea, indisputably, is that there is something rotten in the state of corporate finance and global capitalism: ‘We stand in solidarity with the global oppressed and we call for an end to the actions of our government and others in causing this oppression’, Occupy London declared. ‘You can’t kill an idea’, activists hope, and some their most sympathetic supporters with a voice in the media agree. This is because of the role of the web, and the instant communications that can keep protest alive.
Such is the view of the British economic journalist Paul Mason, who believes the new global revolutions are now unstoppable because ‘the near collapse of free-market capitalism combined with the upswing of technological innovation’ has resulted in ‘a surge in desire for individual freedom and a change in human consciousness about what freedom means.’ The instant access so many have to the amazing resources of web knowledge and communication, he and others argue, can sustain protest as never before.
Yet he is also aware of the dangerous lack of connection between the protesters and any mainstream politics, noting that most of the people he interviewed were hostile to ‘the very idea of a unifying theory’, set of demands, or shared pathway. Mason simply hopes that the movements’ justified moral outrage at things as they are, with a tiny elite getting ever richer as billions globally get poorer, will somehow combine with their networking skills to help realize their vision of a fairer world, while believing that ‘the future hangs in the balance.’
Sustaining resistance
There is a point to growing old: we have a past. So one thing I can say at once is that that the imaginative excitement often unleashed in direct action against perceived injustice, simply being on the scene when you hope, rightly or wrongly, that this moment of collective resistance might leave its mark on history, often permanently changes consciousness. Contrary to clichéd opinion, most rebels, young or old, do not significantly shift their political outlook, though they may well become disillusioned.
Nevertheless, a couple of decades after the initial confidence of movement politics in the 1970s – following three Tory victories and our multiple defeats – the political mood had reversed. Thatcher had successfully targeted all forms of resistance and participatory democratic structures wherever they appeared. Thus, the second thing I know is that, sadly, ideas do fade. In different ways and for a multitude of reasons, in changed contexts dissident ideas are accommodated, distorted or muted completely. Certainly, the priority individuals give to activism, along with the fighting spirit of a movement, shifts – especially, perhaps, a movement as volatile, diffuse and vulnerable to attack as the Occupy movement, once the sanctioned forces of law and order move against it.
Of course it is tiresome to hear, even to say, but to succeed movements like Occupy or the Indignados must manage to reach out not just in the heat of action, but to build coalitions that survive and have impact upon government policies once reality bites and fragmentation and exhaustion set in. With or without jobs, a myriad of personal and shared responsibilities take their toll on rebellious spirits. Beyond spontaneous sites of struggle, the question shifts to whether or how ‘democracy in action’ can be preserved to form a coherent and intelligible opposition. If we really believe in the possibility of a fairer distribution of the world’s resources, and less environmentally polluting uses of them, protest must be preserved and somehow, at least some of the time, made to cohere into something more enduring that can keep pushing for change, attempting to influence those who are in some way close to the levers of power.
Can it be done? The question is all too familiar. This was exactly the issue that motivated Sheila Rowbotham, Hilary Wainwright and I in writing Beyond the Fragments, facing the triumph of Thatcher in the UK, Reagan in the US the following year, and wanting to forestall the installation of what would soon become the deregulated economic model known as neoliberalism that has brought us to the mess we are in today.
At that time, we were writing from what we thought we had learned as a result of more than a decade of activism in different sectors of the then still flourishing radical left, with our own shared feminist, anti-capitalist, socialist perspectives. Today, that economic regime we opposed is itself in continuous crisis, evident in the threatened implosion of the eurozone and the imposition of harsh anti-austerity measures visibly destroying the lives of many of those in greatest need, while also failing to generate what its own mantra of market expansion and ‘growth’ requires. This makes it a perfect time to look back critically at the impact, legacy and, let me say right away, frequent failure of our own often thwarted attempts to move beyond the fragments.
Movements and coalition-building
As David Graeber points out, the consensus-based direct democracy favoured by the Occupy movement adheres to anarchist principles, though it may not name them as such. It is not seeking to change the world through gaining state power or working through existing political or juridical institutions, but rather embracing forms of prefigurative politics, setting up its own alternative kitchens, libraries, clinics and networking centres, alongside other forms of mutual aid and self-organisation. From my visits to Occupy these were often impressively efficient. This movement, with its self-organisation and consensus, is thus busy doing what traditional anarchists have always tried to do, to begin building ‘a new society in the shell of the old’.
1970s feminists, by and large, also shared a belief that self-organisation and collective action could begin to transform everything, from personal lives to workplace conditions, social policy and the law, while impacting on culture generally. For a while, this seemed to work. Retrospectively, however, it is clear that part of the success of feminism related to broader economic change. With government and market priorities allowing the decline of Britain’s industrial base in favour of the expansion of the financial and service sectors, women’s position in society was shifting. Given its influence and success, neither the mainstream nor the left could afford to ignore feminism altogether. It is of course this confidence that enabled us – three women – to think we might make an impact on the left’s ways of organising, promoting both alliance and autonomy, in forums that could encourage the creativity of all who became involved.
Yet, for all feminism’s successes, the close of the 1970s was already a confusing time for many feminists in Britain and elsewhere. Indeed, it was the very success of the movement that intensified the divisions within it. It was this same success that led to us writing Beyond the Fragments during the run up to the general election that would usher in the momentous upheavals of Margaret Thatcher’s decade in power. We hoped that feminist ways of working, at their best, might help broaden and regenerate the left. This broad left would be stronger, we argued, if it were genuinely supportive of the multiplicity of grassroots struggles, instead of either disdaining or attempting to direct them. Conversely, those grassroots struggles would be stronger if they obtained genuine support from a broader left.
We knew that the shared energy and close friendships built up in the small groups most feminists preferred, with their openness and attempts not to impose any ‘party line’, worked well for bringing more people into politics. Such informality fostered individual creativity and encouraged those shifts in identity and sense of agency that bring confidence to hitherto marginalised groups, enabling alliances (or confrontations) with others in the political arena. In this outlook, it was also important not to try to ‘colonise’ or impose our own views on others still finding their voice, and needing time and space to work out their own analyses and preferred forms of resistance when confronting what were usually hitherto unseen hierarchies of privilege and authority (however blatant once they came into view).
Yet this same strong, ideally relaxed, sense of collectivity and bonding could also leave some women feeling distanced from the effects of its more hidden premises, leaving them suspicious of the imagined joys of ‘sisterhood’. Relatedly, the lack of prescribed structures of leadership in no way precludes certain controlling individuals, or simply the most charismatic, sharp or ebullient of people, from becoming dominant figures, whether they wish to or not. Early on, this is exactly what Jo Freeman argued in her widely read, much anthologised essay, coining the now familiar phrase ‘the tyranny of structurelessness’ to describe her experience of the unwitting bullying and hidden mechanisms of control in the women’s movement in the US.
Thus, while we wanted to hold on to the importance of supporting the autonomous struggles of a fluid plurality of voices, with their differing imaginative resources and modes of dissent, we also longed to forestall the conflict that so often arose when shared collective identifications focused upon their most specific needs and goals. Being able to see oneself as part of some larger left formation seemed the only way of attempting to combine the potential strength of movement politics into a broader, more resilient struggle for egalitarian ends – if that left platform could manage to allow as much space as possible for the airing of both our differences and our points of unity.
As soon as it was published, the interest triggered by the initial slim pamphlet Beyond the Fragments generated a noisy conference of almost 3,000 people in Leeds the following year. As we have heard, over the years Beyond the Fragments did apparently influence feminist groups and trade union activists in various places, including India, Turkey and even the Brazilian Workers Party, to name a few. I saw a recent article by Pam Currie, a leading member of the Scottish Socialist Party, citing Beyond the Fragments for its emphasis on tackling sexism in political parties.
Looking back, I think we were right to suggest that many feminist priorities, such as stressing ties between the frustrations of personal life and the need for political change, or focusing on working locally, while supporting women’s struggles globally, did play a significant role in the political achievements of the 1970s. As it turned out, however, with certain very significant exceptions, especially in the early 1980s, we were over-optimistic in imagining that people with similar but far from identical political goals and ways of organising could work together and agree on common action. The recurrent antagonism disrupting the final session of the Beyond the Fragments conference in Leeds in 1980 underscored this. Some feminist groups and other individuals voiced their forceful opposition to our calls for greater ties with the organised left; members of left groups rejected the importance we gave to direct action and autonomous ways of working over democratic centralism and ‘party’ building.
Defeats and retrievals
What happened next? Or as many from left and right both like to ask, ‘who was to blame’ for the defeat of progressive forces by the close of the 1980s? No story is linear. With the right in power, not just in Britain, but in a Britain insistently welcoming the increasingly belligerent hegemony of the right in the US, it would be exceptionally hard for the left to manage to shift the overall political direction and increasingly difficult to agree on the best strategies to pursue.
Significant struggles were still being waged in the early 1980s, evident in the widespread support for the year-long miners’ strike against pit closures in 1984. This was a battle determinedly instigated by Margaret Thatcher, with extraordinary levels of police mobilisation and the orchestration of all possible media demonisation of the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill. However, the defeat of that strike in 1985 significantly weakened the British trade union movement – a once-united National Union of Mineworkers had been one of its strongest members. Meanwhile, the years of Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council and other left councils provided another broad-based, creative surge of resistance to Thatcher, often drawing directly on the ideas of Beyond the Fragments. Nevertheless, in hindsight there are more difficulties than we had expressed in using feminist insights to help surmount the challenge of building radical left coalitions that genuinely make space for spontaneity and autonomy.
As indicated above, the real strengths of the outlook, methods and achievements of the women’s movement in the 1970s were tied in with inevitable limitations. Encouraging autonomy and bringing all the divisions between women around sexuality, race, class, heterosexism and so on out into the open was important for women’s liberation. However, before long it began to destroy any notion of women’s cosy unity. Thus, for instance, while poverty and racism were constant preoccupations of women’s liberation, feminist groups remained largely white and predominantly middle class. This meant that by the close of the 1970s, division was more apparent than unity in many feminist gatherings, as newly empowered groups of women expressed their sense of marginalisation within the movement itself.
Nevertheless, whatever our distinct differences, what few of us could predict then was the extent of the subsequent selective incorporation or mainstreaming of key feminist demands by the state and corporate capital. Attending to some of women’s struggles for equality while ignoring others would launch one tier of professional women even as other women, especially ethnic minorities and poorer women everywhere, were grappling with most of the old problems that women had always faced: juggling paid and unpaid labour in a landscape where violence against women, sexist and racist behaviour, though now officially condemned, remained deeply entrenched. Thus one partial success of feminism, allowing more women into professional elites, could be aligned with the intensification of divisions between women in ways that were barely conceivable in the egalitarian politics we fought for.
However, in my view it was not primarily conflictual internal dynamics that destroyed the early energies of grassroots movements, feminist or otherwise. Those who felt sidelined in the heyday of movement politics regrouped into new clusters in which they could work. The chief problem was the ruthless and unyielding forces soon confronting activists of any progressive stripe in Thatcher’s Britain. The internal divisions within feminism were real enough. But even as new groups kept appearing within feminist spaces, what was disappearing was any forward motion towards the more egalitarian or caring world most once desired. The world was moving in the opposite direction.
As economic survival became more precarious for many, the social networks sustaining progressive thought and practice withered. The public mood shifted, gradually becoming more aligned with Thatcher’s (and then New Labour’s) increasingly hegemonic anti-welfare, market-driven culture. The level of political activity that grassroots struggle demands usually withers in unfavourable conditions, and this certainly happened to the confidence needed for initiatives at left unity. There would nevertheless be many other attempts in the decades that followed to try again, never free from the difficulties faced by that first conference in Leeds. Indeed, it is the same strategy that emerged at a global level at the close of the 1990s with the sudden upsurge of interest in the World Social Forums. Those working hard to create unity and pursue change through flexible consensus and networking, however, are still beset by dangers on all sides. Coalitions are always threatened by both conflicting movements and invasive vanguards.
Cherishing autonomy, building alliances
Turning back to that paradoxical moment in 1979, when we worked together on Beyond the Fragments, I know I am returning to another world: a time when commitments to equality, direct democracy and the need to develop and share the skills and imagination of everyone made sense to the people we knew. Context is always critical. Yet it is as evident now as it was 40 years ago that we are drawn into collective resistance in a multitude of different, unpredictable ways. It is rarely established political parties, mainstream or radical, confident in their certainties of the best way forward, that bring new groups into politics. It is rather any number of shared personal issues and collective identifications in specific cultural contexts. Conjunctures are critical, but certain insights remain.
So, despite so much change over the decades, my own thoughts today are not so far from my position a generation ago. If we hope to see a new and more vibrant left again, we need to support and try to connect both the multiplicity of expressions of direct action as well as any emerging, genuinely democratic and inclusive coalitions of resistance against contemporary corporate capital and the environmental pollution that comes in its wake. We need today, as yesterday, direct action, movement politics and any coalition of resistance to seek diverse ways of influencing national government.
The old anti-statism of some of the left is far too closely attuned to the dominant refrains of neoliberalism, promising to ‘get government off our backs’, to be very useful. In the UK, with our still unchanged electoral system, this means once more helping to strengthen left Labour (whether from inside or outside the party). Or perhaps, as some are doing, trying to strengthen the left forces within the Green Party, working for a safer environment as well as a more egalitarian and peaceful world. Different strategies are possible and the most effective hard to gauge.
Returning more cautiously to where I began, this leaves me welcoming the direct action of today, while also hoping as strongly as ever for some consolidation of the diverse forms of resistance into a more challenging left coalition – so long as that coalition, whatever its inevitable failings, tries to remain as open and democratic as possible.

FREE when you become a Friend of Red Pepper: Beyond the Fragments latest edition

Red Pepper is volunteer led and we rely on your support to be here. We strive to counter right-wing myths, to provide a space for debate across the left and to put forward alternatives ideas for a more just society. Please support independent media at this crucial time while we face environmental crises and the destruction of the welfare state, become a Friend of Red Pepper today.

In return, you’ll receive a subscription to the magazine plus invitations to events. To claim your free book email jenny@redpepper.org.uk to arrange delivery.

Sexism and the left: Fight the (invisible) power

admin — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:00:10 +0000

The past few months have seen a spate of revelations about poor handling of sexual abuse, assault and harassment within organisations across the political spectrum, so that frequently it is difficult to keep track of who allegedly has been covering up what.

The closer to home it is, the more it hurts. When it’s the Lib Dems, it feels like something happening far away. When it’s the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) – comrades with whom I have organised – it feels far more of a pressing danger. I am hardly surprised that people are leaving the party in droves over the very messy and public detailing of how it handled allegations of rape against a leading member. Despite a large number of members expressing outrage over the way the matter had been handled, delegates at a special conference in March voted overwhelmingly in support of the central committee. Had I ever been a member, I’d have left a thousand times over.

The structure of hierarchical institutions – of all political persuasions – facilitates the failure to deal with sexual violence. The explicit power structures of such organisations have consequences. Those higher up the pecking order are more integral to the organisation, more important. They are the ones deemed more worthy of protection. So, if a person in a high-up position is accused of sexual violence, it is they, not the survivor, who is more likely to be rallied around. Of course it will usually be men occupying these positions of power.
Untouchable
These men develop a sense of being untouchable because, in a sense, they are. From celebrities such as Jimmy Savile to key members of political parties to the Catholic Church, it has become abundantly clear that within the institutions sexual violence is swept under the carpet because it is seen as more important to keep such important figures onside. Better to maintain the talent, the funder, the brains, they believe. It becomes an act of treachery to address specific instances of sexual violence as crucial figures within organisations become emblematic of those organisations both to those on the inside and those outside. Those who come forward and speak of their experience of sexual violence are all too often demonised, or ignored at best.
This problem is amplified by the role of the police, if the police are involved. A corrupt institution, dominated by white men and granted the position of gatekeeper to justice by the state, the police get to choose whether to investigate instances of sexual violence. All too often they choose not to, deciding that there is not enough proof. And the police have more than enough skeletons in their own closet: between 2008 and 2012, there were 56 reported cases of sexual violence involving police officers. Given the phenomenal levels of under-reporting of sexual violence generally, the real figure is likely far higher. It is hardly surprising that taking the state route to justice for rape is a journey many survivors are unwilling to take.
Institutional hierarchy, though, is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for sexual violence – or the failure to address it. Rather, it exacerbates a problem that is pervasive throughout all of society. It makes it easier for powerful men to exploit the implicit discrepancies in power, which are present and often ignored. It is no coincidence that defenders of the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations, talk of his anti-government work, at best ignoring a discussion of sexual violence. It is easier to conceptualise the explicit power structure of an unfair state than it is to think about how men have power over women and may abuse it. Yet the invisible power structures of a kyriarchical system – a structure of overlapping oppressions – are replicated within anti-capitalist groups, anti-war groups, anarchist circles and all those of us who are, nominally at least, fighting the power.
Subject of ridicule
Issues of gender, race, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism and so forth are treated as intellectual exercises rather than a daily reality. The notion of privilege is scoffed at, the notion of addressing this treated as a subject of ridicule. There is a pervasive pattern of thought that these are things that might need fixing but can be fixed after the revolution. Whether there is a formal leader or not, a climate is created wherein it is very difficult for survivors to speak out about sexual violence they have experienced, and nearly impossible for communities to deal with the problem.
We do not need the machinations of hierarchical organisations to address sexual violence in our own communities. Far from it, as we have seen so many times how these formal structures and codified processes and chains of command can exacerbate and facilitate the problem. Neither do we need the police to solve this problem for us: they cannot, they will not, and this will never change. We do not need heroes or champions, figures seen as integral to how we organise: all too often, when these heroes are accused of sexual violence, it is the sexual violence that is denied and ignored in order to maintain the status of the hero.
What we need is something new entirely. We need to let go of these hierarchies into which we were socialised. We need to address our own prejudices and privileges, accept that sexism remains a problem on the left and from this position begin to deal with it. We need to organise within our communities and networks against sexual violence, and this process should be led by survivors. Survivors are, after all, those best placed to have an analysis about what needs to be done, and we must listen to these voices and create a safe space for survivors to speak out.
Yet it is ultimately worthwhile. What point is there to a revolution when many remain unsafe? Nothing changes. What is the point of undoing visible hierarchies when the invisible ones remain in place? Nothing changes. This is a pressing problem, and one for which a solution is long overdue.

‘I can hear the roar of women’s silence’

emma — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 08:36:06 +0000

It was Thursday, 4th August 1983 in what was soon to be renamed Burkina Faso. On this day, a coup d’etat led by Captains Thomas Sankara and Blaise Compaoré set in motion a Pan-Africanist, Marxist, revolution which sought to liberate Franz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” from the clutches of imperialism and neo-colonialism. Sankara emphasised the universality of the Burkinabe revolution in his address to the UN General Assembly a year after becoming President of the National Council of the Revolution.
“Our revolution in Burkina Faso embraces the misfortunes of all peoples. It draws its inspiration from all of man’s experiences since his first breath. We wish to be heirs of all the revolutions and all the liberation struggles of the peoples of the Third World.”
Sankara’s revolutionary vision was based on ‘self-reliance’ and solidarity and included an ambitious programme of development – health, education, agriculture, infrastructure and an end to the excesses so familiar in African governance today- hyper corruption and consumerism. He embarked on an agrarian revolution which including the planting of millions of trees and land reform. He called for the full cancellation of the continent’s debt, rejected foreign aid and asserted that only a complete rejection of the norms of global capitalism and imperialist domination would liberate Africans.
But it was Sankara’s focus on women’s emancipation and its meaning for all of humanity, that distinguished his revolutionary vision. Sankara argued that the key to social transformation was in improving the status of women and he demanded that they be a central part of the revolutionary project. Sankara did not just make pronouncements, he was meticulous in explaining class relations and the everyday ways in which African masculinities work in collaboration with capital in exploiting women’s labour and abuse of their dignity. His analysis of gendered and sexualised social relations would be considered progressive even today:
“It was the transformation from one form of society to another that served to institutionalize women’s inequality. This inequality was produced by our own minds and intelligence in order to develop a concrete form of domination and exploitation. The social function and roles to which women have been relegated ever since are a living reflection of this fact.”
Describing the home as the premier sight of capitalist reproductive exploitation and sexualised oppression, Sankara’s government campaigned against forced marriages, polygamy, and female genital mutilation and tribal markings. Women were for the first time able to initiate divorce without the consent of their husbands. Sankara insisted that men take an active part in the domestic sphere by experiencing those activities traditionally left to women such as preparing meals, going to the market and caring for children. At the same time he encouraged women to take on jobs that had previously been the domain of men including joining the military. He also began a programme of dismantling traditional sites of patriarchy by reducing the powers of village chiefs and nationalising all land. Other areas where his government prioritised women’s equality were in providing improved access to education and public health through a nation-wide adult literacy and grassroots health programmes. Significantly he was the first African leader to appoint a large number of women to government positions including the cabinet.
One of the primary instruments in the transition of women towards full citizenship was the Women’s Union of Burkina Faso [UFB]. Sankara described the UFB as “the organisation of militant and serious women”. These were the women of the revolution drawn from the urban workers and rural ‘peasants’ classes. Sankara repeatedly urged the UFB women to break away from the “kind of practices and behaviour traditionally thought of as female”.
On International Women’s Day March 8th, 1987 Sankara addressed thousands of women in Ougadougou calling for the emancipation of women in Burkina Faso and throughout the continent. In the speech he explained in great detail, the material base for women’s oppression rejecting simplistic theories such as biological differences
“At this moment, we have little choice but to recognise that masculine behaviour comprises vanity, irresponsibility, arrogance, and violence of all kinds towards women. This kind of behaviour can hardly lead to coordinated action against women’s oppression. Such attitudes are in reality nothing but a safety valve for the oppressed male, who, through brutalising his wife, hopes to regain some of the human dignity denied him by the system of exploitation. This masculine foolishness is called sexism or machismo. It often gives politically conscious women no choice but to consider it their duty to wage a war on two fronts.”
On Thursday 15th October 1987, the Burkinabe revolution ended when Sankara along with 12 comrades were assassinated in a counter-revolutionary coup led by Blaise Compaoré. In his betrayal like Mobutu’s betrayal of Patrice Lumumba, Compaoré donned the “white mask” and returned the Burkinabe people and Burkina Faso to a neo-colonialist state.
Sankara lived the Burkinabe revolution by example and insisted his ministers and government officials do the same. Thomas Sankara’s was committed to removing the injustices of imperialism not just in Burkina Faso but in the whole continent. In remembering Sankara we are also reminded of the enormity of the struggle we face if we are to achieve the kind of social transformation he envisaged.

Go Feminist: Feminism for all

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:31:22 +0000

Photo: Carrie Bradin
Specifically designed to connect feminist activists, spark debate and showcase the diversity of the movement, the inaugural Go Feminist conference took place in London at the beginning of February. As the organisers stated in their F Word blog post:
‘We do this as a response to feminism’s most sustained critique: that it is not for all women. Although women from all backgrounds and communities identify with feminist beliefs, the movement still does not completely take into account their needs and realities. Too often in our feminist spaces, the voices of a few are privileged. Race is inadequately dealt with. Our spaces, both physical and virtual, are inaccessible to women living with disabilities. Trans women’s involvement is actively discouraged.’
To that end, this was a conference that at its core was concerned with how to make the movement accessible to all. From the availability of speech-to-text and signers for the hearing impaired at every plenary session to the range of workshops on offer, the aim was to reflect the multiple faces of feminism today.
Attending other feminist conferences, I have often left feeling that my identity as a woman was deemed more important and treated separately from other important elements of who I am. For me, this has resulted in leaving my identity as a working-class black immigrant at the door. This lack of dialogue around how various forms of oppression act upon an individual, as well as how many of us, myself included, experience other areas of privilege we do not readily recognise, was something the morning workshop, ‘Ensuring feminism is a movement for all women: the way forward – intersectionality’, aimed to confront.
The workshop sought to tackle head on issues around oppression and privilege. One of the ice-breaker activities involved attendees stepping forward or back according to whether a particular statement applied to them: ‘I grew up in a household with more than 50 books’, ‘My parents were professionals such as doctors, lawyers, teachers etc’ and so on. The activity was a learning exercise for participants who had not previously considered themselves as having any privileges. It also demonstrated how assumptions about the makeup of an individual’s identity are invariably two‑dimensional. We are all much more complex and share far more connections than we first believe.
The group discussion that followed allowed people to talk through ideas on how they could actively place intersectionality at the core of their feminism. Importantly, the facilitators were themselves challenged on how the workshop had not been entirely inclusive in relation to people from single‑parent households and with physical disabilities. This was something that they acknowledged and promised to rectify in future sessions. All of us can and do make mistakes, but we must, as a movement, provide a space and atmosphere in which such challenges are greeted not as antagonistic but as helpful and therefore acted upon.
One of the highlights of the conference was the penultimate plenary session on sexism in popular culture, chaired by the writer and broadcaster Bidisha, which looked at the skewed and sexist representation of women in this arena. Beginning with an analysis of women and sports, Bidisha succinctly stated that coverage invariably focused on ‘boobs, bums and bikinis’. And a question from a young participant around how the movement can engage more with those who are not already converted was thought-provoking.
Panellist Kealy Hastick, from the women’s organisation Platform 51 (formerly the YWCA), eloquently told us that young women find it difficult to identify as feminists because ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. This gave something of an answer as to how and why the movement seems to only speak to the same select and, often, privileged few. Despite the fact that feminist ideas and ideals are broadly supported by, dare I even say it, the majority of men and women I know, they would nevertheless be loath to label themselves feminists. Yet few would agree to championing violence against women.
It is apt, then, that the conference towards its close opened up a space to discuss this most important of issues: how do we engage people who are receptive to our ideas but outside our ‘normal’ feminist circles? It seems to me that we must go back to both the aims of the conference and Kealy Hastick’s idea. We, feminists, have to show the wider public that the movement is made up of people exactly like them, and debunk the myth that a feminist looks and speaks in a particular way. We have to prove, through our inclusive practice, as bell hooks put it, that ‘feminism is for everyone’.
Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and journalist

Niger Delta: a quiet resistance

admin — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:30:32 +0000

Women stand next to an oil wellhead that since 2004 has been regularly spilling crude oil near the community of Ikot Ada Udo in the Niger Delta. Photo: Kadir van Lohuizen/Science for Human Rights
The Niger Delta has been at the centre of Nigeria’s post‑independence military project from the first coup in 1966 through to the present. To the outside world it remained a forgotten outpost, however, until the 1990s and the rise of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Since then, unequivocal evidence has emerged of how the region and its commerce – primarily the oil industry – has been systematically militarised, with violence by the state, multinationals and local militias deployed as an instrument of governance and intimidation to force the people into total submission.
This militarisation – and resistance to it – has taken place in the context of an ongoing series of struggles over resources. As the dispossessed indigenous communities have continued to demand corporate responsibility, environmental, economic and social justice and proper compensation, their protests have been met with murders, torture, rape, the burning of homes and property and an ever increasing military presence. The outcome is an intensely militarised region ‘secured’ by an unrestrained and unaccountable tripartite force, comprising the Nigerian military, multinational oil companies and local militias.
Women in the Delta
Formal women’s groups have historically been a part of the social and political organisation in the Niger Delta. Though these have tended to be based around cultural activities, they have also provided women-only spaces to organise voices of inclusion and assertion. The establishment and recognition of these organisations has helped provide a strong power base from which to challenge the multinationals.
Women’s resistance in the Delta can be traced back to the early 1990s and the Ogoni movement MOSOP, which was led by the late Ken Saro-Wiwa. Ogoni women formed the Federation of Ogoni Women (FOWA) and were at the forefront of the demands for autonomy and control of resources in Ogoni land. FOWA was instrumental in preventing Shell from returning to Ogoni land after the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged by the Nigerian state along with eight other activists in 1995. By the early 2000s, women in Rivers, Baye lsa and Delta State were organising protests and occupations against environmental destruction, lack of development in their communities and lack of employment by oil companies such as Shell, Chevron, Elf, Mobil and Agip.
Demonstrators protest in Warri
In 2002, 600 women from different generations and ethnic groups – Ijaw, Itsekiri and Ilaje – came together in an alliance with young people in actions against oil firm Chevron. The women led the protest against Chevron at the company’s Escravos facility near Warri. They demanded jobs for their sons and husbands, investment in the local infrastructure and a cleanup of the environmental damage caused by oil exploration. For ten days, refusing to move, they blocked the production of oil. This was a huge achievement because the different ethnic groups had previously been in conflict with each other for many years over the meagre resources handed out by government and oil companies.
Women have often been drawn into political activity as a result of attacks by the Nigerian army’s Joint Task Force (JTF) or repeated intimidation by local militias. In 2009, the Ijaw communities of Gbaramatu were invaded by the JTF using attack helicopters and tanks. Homes and farmlands were destroyed and, fearing for their lives, women ran into the mangrove swamps with their children and the elderly, where they either hid from the soldiers or attempted to make their way to the nearest city of Warri. About 2,000 women were eventually housed in a refugee camp for six months before returning home. In September 2011, hundreds of women from the Gbaramatu communities occupied the Chevron facility at Chanomi Creek, disrupting the laying of pipelines for a liquid gas project. The protests were a response to broken promises, made by both Chevron and the federal government, to provide communities with water and electricity.
In Rumuekpe and Okrika women have organised to protect themselves and their livelihoods following intimidation by local militia, many of whom were found to have been paid by oil companies, including Shell. Rumuekpe is unusual in that there are four oil companies operating in the vicinity of the town, which has resulted in rivalries among the militias, traditional leaders and carpetbaggers all vying for a share of the oil monies.

During a recent visit to the region, I spoke with women activists from Rumekepe. The women told me how militia members paid by oil companies had terrorised the town to the point where everyone was forced to flee, abandoning their homes, property and farms to seek refuge in nearby Port Harcourt. During the period of terror, 60 people were killed.
What is left is a ghost town. On the day I visited, the women were fearful that we were being watched and it was too dangerous for me to stay for any length of time or walk through the town centre. The women made the point that in towns and villages that did not have oil people lived in peace. This confirmed for many that it was the oil, and the oil companies, who were responsible for the violence and militarisation of their town.
The decision by the women to meet me in the abandoned town and speak out was an act of resistance and great courage. Okrika was under double occupation: on the one hand by the JTF soldiers and on the other by local armed militias. The prize is access to oil storage and processing revenues. The result is a community of mainly women, children and the elderly living in fear.
Sitting on oneself
The impact of militarisation has been especially brutal in its impact on the lives of women and girls and resistance to the violence is not always obvious to an outsider. What may initially appear as passivity in these circumstances may actually be a show of strength. For example, ‘sitting on oneself’ – the act of a mature woman standing in quiet dignity – is a silent response to violence and intimidation that can become a very powerful act. Individual actions such as these are ways of managing suffering on a personal level by turning inwards to the self and one’s family.
Much of the organising today takes place around prayer gatherings. Again, this may seem passive, but the church plays a central role in the lives of women and their communities by providing support and opportunities for collective actions that can become radicalised. This happened with the women of Liberia, who were united through the church in their fight for peace.
The success of women’s protests should not be seen solely in terms of the immediate impact on multinational oil companies. We should consider the wider impacts: the politicisation of women and the bringing together of communities such as the Itsekiri and Ijaw women in Delta State, who were driven into manipulated conflicts by the actions of the state and multinationals.
Sokari Ekine is a Nigerian feminist, writer and social justice activist. She blogs at Black Looks

A neoliberal assault on women

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:25:36 +0000

Within hours of the 22 June announcements it was clear that the burden of the regressive emergency budget would fall disproportionately on women. A study published by the House of Commons Library in early July went some way to confirming this. The gender audit of the budget, commissioned by shadow minster for work and pensions Yvette Cooper, concluded that more than 70 per cent of the revenue raised from direct tax and benefit changes is to come from female taxpayers. This research excludes the effects of public service cuts; the full impact on women is set to be much worse.

Hitting the family hard

While all departments (apart from the NHS and overseas aid, they claim) face major cuts in their annual budgets, the immediate pain will be felt most by those with young children and single parents, nine out of 10 of whom are female.

The picture was gloomy even before the cuts: 52 per cent of single parent families are below the government-defined poverty line and in one survey more than half the mothers questioned said they are not adequately prepared to cope financially once the baby arrives. Benefits cuts are set to exacerbate the situation, with the coalition budget attacking women and single parents on several fronts.

First, income support will be cut for all parents – when their children reach school age they will be moved onto jobseeker’s allowance. This will mean that single parents will effectively be forced into work or face their benefits being cut off completely.

Second, the health in pregnancy grant, a £190 payment to all pregnant women beyond their 25th week of pregnancy, will be abolished next April. The government will also restrict eligibility to the Sure Start maternity grant to the first child only. The grant is a one-off £500 payment for those on a low income to help towards the costs of a new baby. The new ‘toddler tax credit’, which would have provided an extra £4 a week for families with children aged one or two, is also to be scrapped, along with the child trust fund. Child benefit has been frozen for three years – an effective cut in real terms.

All this means that the lowest income families with new babies will now be £1,293 a year worse off. Those with second children on the way will be hit even harder. And this before you take into account changes to housing benefit: lone parent families are three times as likely to live in rented accommodation as families with two resident parents.

Liz, a mother of two and a part-time NHS worker, told Red Pepper: ‘The impact on women who are lone mothers smacks of total ignorance of the knock-on effects on children. The expectation to work does not take into account the support needed to let this happen, particularly if service cuts will lead to further deterioration in provision. There’s the potential cost of a rise in mental health issues and child protection issues resulting from the lack of support.’

The education sector has already seen cuts that hit women disproportionately hard. Manchester’s Mule reported in June that workers at Manchester City College had described proposed cuts at the college as ‘fairly overt sex discrimination’ after crèche workers faced compulsory redundancies. A source told the paper: ‘It is an undisputed fact that most childcare arrangements fall onto the shoulders of mothers in society. By changing holidays and increasing working hours, the college has not taken childcare needs into account.’ The state was effectively turning back the clock and shifting the burden back on to women.

A similar situation arose last year at Sussex University, which announced cuts of £8 million over two years due to reductions in government funding. Among the 115 redundancies announced were plans to axe the campus nursery and crèche.

Employment problems

Even before the cuts were announced it was obvious that women would bear the brunt of the austerity measures focused on cutting back the public sector. Sixty-five per cent of workers in the public sector are women and around four in ten women work in the public sector, compared with fewer than two in ten men.

Most Whitehall departments face cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent and unions estimate that this will lead to around a million job losses over the next few years.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (see page 13) puts the figure slightly lower at 610,000 by 2016. The analysis by this newly independent body, set up by the Treasury, suggests just 4.92 million people will be working in the public sector in 2015-16, compared to 5.53 million today.

And the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) suggests that a majority of the staff likely to lose their jobs will be women in part-time work or on low wages.

Those remaining in work could also find it difficult. The CIPD has warned that there will likely be ‘ongoing real wage cuts in the public sector’, with the government announcing a two-year pay freeze for all but the lowest paid.

Ceri Goddard, the Fawcett Society’s chief executive, says: ‘Against a backdrop of unequal pay – women are still paid 16.4 per cent less for full time work and 35 per cent less for part time work than men – the impact on women will be huge.’

A difficult retirement?

The cuts will also have an impact on women into their retirement. The political blog Left Foot Forward reports that pensioner poverty is already ‘far more prevalent among women than men, with women’s average income in retirement just 62 per cent of the level that the average retired man will have to live on’. Public sector pensions currently improve women’s overall level of pension provision but with the loss of jobs will come loss of pension rights and the gender gap may widen further, plunging more women pensioners into poverty.

The BBC is now trying to close its final salary pensions, a move that could pave the way for similar cuts in the public sector. The corporation has proposed that pensions are based on how much an employee has paid in and that they increase by a maximum of one per cent per year rather than being linked to final incomes. Unions are now worried that this model will be adopted across the public sector, disproportionately affecting women in an area where there are already gross inequalities.

Katie, an NHS worker from Manchester, told Red Pepper: ‘They say the NHS is protected but we know cuts are coming. We’re all worried about our pensions because cuts there will have a huge long-term effect across the public sector.’

More to come

We have yet to see the true extent of the cuts, which could be as deep as 40 per cent for some departments. What we do know is that Osborne aims to cut £99 billion from annual government spending by 2016.

The emergency budget was just one aspect of the recent neoliberal attacks on the state, now dressed up as the ‘Big Society’, the depth of which Thatcher could only have dreamed. But in among the swinging axes and falling debris, there are the green shoots of a grass-roots recovery. Over the page we look at some of the organisations that are starting – or continuing – the fightback.

All together now

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:22:25 +0000

Mainstream analyses of the budget announcements have noted, to varying degrees, the disproportionate blows Osborne’s axe has inflicted on women. The coverage is welcome. Yet the newly-in-opposition politicians making the issue front-page news, such as shadow work and pensions minister Yvette Cooper, appear to have forgotten their own previous stances in government. Real opposition comes from the bottom up.

For Cooper and co, it’s politics as usual, but there is a lot more at stake here than point scoring. These are not temporary measures. We cannot afford to overlook the ideology behind the cuts, as particular behaviours are rewarded when others are punished.

As Tim Hunt shows (see page 28), the UK’s two million single parents, 92 per cent of them women, will suffer terribly as a result of the cuts. And we don’t need to read between the lines for the message; David Cameron has been quite open about it. Last December he declared: ‘Commitment and relationships and marriage are good institutions. We shouldn’t be completely neutral about them as a society. I think the tax and benefits systems … need to think about what other long-term signals that we are sending out as a society.’ The implications of this budget go deeper than our wallets.

Social attitudes towards gender equality have evolved over recent decades. The mere acknowledgement that welfare and public service cuts will differentially and disproportionately affect women would not have made headlines 20 years ago. Then, unemployment was still largely a male issue. As the rhetoric of ‘necessary pain’ beds in, however, this progress faces reversal. The space for addressing pervasive inequalities that has been opened must be quickly seized.

Call to arms

In the last issue of Red Pepper (Jun/Jul 2010), Catherine Redfern and Laurie Penny debated contemporary currents in feminism. Penny concluded that, without groups coming together with shared goals of social justice for all and taking real action to achieve them, the number of women self-defining as feminists is largely irrelevant. The groups featured over the previous pages answer Penny’s call to arms.

At the Crossroads Women’s Centre in Hackney, space and resources are shared by groups including WinVisible and Single Mothers Self Defence, alongside the English Collective of Prostitutes, All African Women’s Group and Wages Due Lesbians, among others. In their activism, each notes degrees of social exclusion and political marginalisation including but not limited to gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality and disability. Here, equality is inclusive and no one should be oppressed. If the marginalised are to be empowered, take action and force change, we must recognise that we are in this together.

These groups are raising awareness through lobbying, petitioning, protesting and writing to local and national press. They are forming solidarity-led networks to share information and stand in allegiance. Their focus is on supporting those who need it.

Austerity measures announcements have been met by women-led campaigns elsewhere. On 8 March this year, the Greek Communist Party-affiliated union PAME held a peaceful protest coinciding with International Women’s Day, symbolically emphasising the gender-biased impact of cuts to civil servants’ salaries, pension freezes and increased general sales tax. In May, women public service workers rallied outside the Italian parliament in Rome, protesting against similar budget decisions. Just as European governments find justification for their actions in mirroring other states’ language and policy, campaign groups are being handed opportunities to form international bonds.

Inspiration can be drawn from the past as well as abroad. While comment and comparison with Thatcher era cuts have littered budget analyses, attention should also be turned to those who fought her policies on the streets, picket lines and through non-payment campaigns.

In histories of anti-poll tax campaigns, there is a sad yet predictable paucity of women’s voices, despite their undoubted presence. Unions and political parties were marked then by a disproportionate presence of male voices, a tendency that continues to this day. But where women are still unable to be heard institutionally, grass-roots organisations will emerge.

Theoretical disagreements occasionally blunted explicitly feminist movements during the 1980s, and these movements often overshadowed women-led movements reacting to more broadly felt social injustices. Women Against Pit Closures, for instance, creditable as the glue that held the miners’ strike together, deserves more attention. This grassroots, working-class movement put feminism into practice, empowering women to step into a male-dominated world and assert the importance of their opinions and roles in the community.

This time round, the marginalised voices speaking out against the cuts demand to be listened to, now.

These articles are part of our series on emerging political movements, made possible with the help of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust

Together we can win

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:20:48 +0000

National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts Women’s Liberation

After six successful months in action, women in the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts took the decision to pioneer a newly formed affiliated movement, NCAFC Women’s Liberation, as a logical route to expansion.

The liberation movement is set to tackle imminent threats to women who are studying and working in education. This includes resistance to childcare cuts, with nurseries being swatted like flies at Queen Mary University, University of Westminster, University of the Arts London and elsewhere. We are also highlighting cuts in ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) teaching, which specifically targets and discriminates against immigrant women, making them even more vulnerable.

We are intent on wedging into the National Union of Students (NUS) bureaucracy and lobbying women’s officers to carry out audits on how education cuts will affect women on their campuses – and to build campaigns on top of the research. We will be conducting our own audit and actively encourage students to pass motions at union AGMs in favour of assigning a designated women’s officer where there is not one already. Most of all we are looking to link up with other feminist campaigns to fight the cuts.

NCAFC Women’s Liberation made its first public outing by intervening at the NUS anti-cuts meeting on 29 June. Since then we have been gathering momentum as the gender-biased knock-on effects of the government’s plans become clear. When term starts up again, we will be ready to fight them all the way.

www.anticuts.com

Women in Prison

We have been fighting the inequality experienced by women in a criminal justice system designed for men for over 25 years. We believe that the vast majority of women in prison should not be there. For the few women for whom a custodial sentence may be appropriate, the custodial settings we currently have certainly are not.

More women than men report a financial motivation for their offending behaviour. An emergency budget that penalises those out of work and devalues mothering (through loss of health in pregnancy grants, freezes in child benefit and the loss of the maternity grant for additional children) will drive many of the women we work with deeper into poverty.

Concurrently, we risk losing ground gained to massive public spending cuts. Over the last few years there has been increasing recognition that prisons, police and probation need to work in a women-specific way. In 2009, government funding was provided to establish more than 30 new projects working to divert women away from custody through community-based, holistic support services. WomenMATTA, a partnership project between Women in Prison and the Pankhurst Centre in Manchester, is one such project. Launched in February, WomenMATTA is providing individual and group support, advice and information, drop-ins and channels for women to engage in campaigning.

Responsibility for sustaining funding for these projects belongs to directors of offender management, regional heads of the National Offender Management Service. This agency is facing budget cuts of 25 per cent and over. Will all of these projects be continued? What will happen to the women who have built up relationships of trust with projects that may vanish?

WIP convenes the SWAP (Supporting Women – Against Prison) campaign network, bringing organisations together to challenge inequality in the criminal justice system and reduce the women’s prison population. These public spending cuts only emphasise how much is still to fight for.

www.womeninprison.org.uk

WinVisible

We are a multi-racial group of women with visible and invisible disabilities campaigning for independent living resources. We are united as service users, from Fife to southern England, to challenge care charges and losses.

In an inaccessible world, disability is work. But our workload is scarcely acknowledged, let alone reduced. As women, we are often looking after other people while coping with our own disability. Those of us who are black, immigrant or seeking asylum are judged to deserve even less.

Over recent decades charges for council care, rationing and privatisation have brought suffering to disabled and older people, mainly women pensioners. Councils have devolved responsibility for support onto local disability organisations. Created to defend us, many have become council gatekeepers.

Jennyfer Spencer, a wheelchair user and former teacher, was found dead in her inaccessible flat after Camden Council stopped her direct payments. A coalition of friends, disability and anti-racist groups are now demanding a public inquiry. Last year, the same council made an elderly couple choose between humiliating means-testing or paying £13 per hour for care. After we protested, their free service was reinstated.

But the new round of cuts will put many more at risk. And if the new ‘medical test’ for disability living allowance is similar to examinations carried out by the multinational company Atos, which assesses capability for work, it will exclude two thirds of claimants, including some with terminal cancer.

The transfer of existing incapacity claimants to back-to-work contractors such as A4e rewards businesses, not claimants. These companies make millions, yet place only 6 per cent of disabled participants in work, compared to 14 per cent at Jobcentres.

WinVisible is part of the No to Welfare Abolition Network. On the 16 June national day of action, one picketer reflected: ’People too unwell to work are bullied into work. Others who want jobs are set up to fail.’ Another expressed the general mood: ‘We can’t let them get away with it.’ Together, we can win the support we are all entitled to.

www.winvisible.org

Women’s Budget Group

We are an independent organisation, with around 200 members – researchers, policy experts and activists, working together to promote gender equality through appropriate economic policy.

We have been scrutinising the gender implications of UK budgets since the early 1990s. In all our work, we ask the question: where do resources go, and what impact does resource allocation have on gender equality? The WBG aims to not only encourage but assist the government in using gender analysis to improve its economic policy making. We also advocate specific policies requiring public bodies actively to promote gender equality and combat discrimination.

This has already had an impact. The last government was intending to pay working families tax credit through the pay packet of the main earner (usually a man). Lobbying from the WBG and others led to it being paid as a benefit to the household. There is also an equality duty requiring every government policy to be subject to analysis from the point of view of its impact on women.

Our latest report, A Gender Impact Assessment of the Coalition Government Budget, June 2010, is available on our website.

www.wbg.org.uk

Single Mothers Self Defence

We are a network of single mothers defending our entitlement to income support, the main benefit recognising the work of raising children. We assert the societal value of mothering and other caring work, and the damage caused to children deprived of it.

Emma Harrison, founder of government contractor A4e, herself a single mother, is reputedly ‘worth’ £40 million. But the story is very different for most of the women employed through her work-for-welfare business. Mothers are furious at being forced into US-style ‘workfare’, expected to park our children in battery childcare for the benefit of employers. Once we have been unemployed for 12 months, we’re expected to ‘work for our benefits’ for £1.60 per hour.

SMSD member Kim says: ‘They want companies to employ us so they can bypass the minimum wage, bringing everyone’s wages down. Unions must realise that they can’t defend members’ wages without working with claimants to defend benefits.’

Child benefit is now frozen. More children will be threatened with care because of their mothers’ poverty. We recently defended a single mother threatened with fostering after she asked social services for support. Other mothers are resorting to sex work. Jenny, from Manchester, said: ‘Benefits don’t cover the cost of gas, electricity and water rates. That’s why I go out. If they cut benefits there’ll be more of us out there facing arrest and violence.’

Contact 020 7482 2496 / smsd@allwomencount.net

Feminist parenting

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:27:35 +0000

1 Integrate

Feminists should confront all forms of oppression, exploitation and hierarchy. Parents, carers and children are often marginalised and discriminated against, even in radical political organising. Insist that childcare is provided at every event. Understand that ‘mothering’, ‘parenting’ and ‘childrearing’ have different connotations: the next generation needs people of all genders, races, classes, sexualities, ages and abilities to help it develop healthy attitudes to life. Involve children and treat them as equals worthy of respect.

2 Bin the box

Television only makes the gender divide worse. As a compromise, try using the set just to watch videos or DVDs. Until your kids are old enough to sneak in Ben 10 box sets under their jumpers, you can more or less censor what gets played, without any annoying adverts. However, if the electronic babysitter is your lifeline to parental sanity, then keep it on. TV provides a parent with a wealth of material that highlights the inequalities in society – and therefore gives lots of opportunities to talk constructively about the realities of patriarchy with your child.

3 Be honest

You may try to kid yourself that the media and peer pressure are the biggest influences on your child, but actually it’s you! The main parent or carer is a child’s most influential role-model. Are you sexist, racist, homophobic? What, not even a little bit? Children can subconsciously absorb even the most subtle of parental behaviours. It’s okay to make mistakes – no one is perfect. But it’s important to deconstruct our own words, actions and attitudes to ensure that we don’t inadvertently pass our own prejudices onto our children. Be honest with yourself and your kids. Talk openly about sex, relationships and sexuality. Encourage children to freely express all of their emotions – no matter how painful they are.

4 Express yourself

Creatively expressing the often intense feelings that come with parenthood can be a great emotional release – whether through art, writing, music or dance. Bringing up children can seem like a lonely business at times, but there are lots of parenting blogs, networks, groups and resources out there. If it’s more anger management therapy you need, then try this: find a magazine photo of the latest yummy-mummy female celebrity, stick it onto on a dartboard and get throwing those arrows! You will begin to see the cracks appear in the smooth airbrushed image of maternal perfection … and feel a devilish sense of satisfaction.

5 Research the issues

Research the many conflicting feminist and parenting schools of thought. Natural parenting options may work for some, but others argue that it’s pushing more burdens upon the mother. For example, using washable nappies isn’t only the eco-option, it also increases parental autonomy and challenges the capitalist-consumption machine. But what about the extra housework that washable nappies can bring? Will it really be shared equally among family members? Work out what’s best for you and your family – a critical factor of feminist parenting is to stop pretending we are perfect parents.

6 Pick your battles

Constantly nagging your kids to over-analyse sexist books or toys will only push them further into the open arms of Mattel and co. Sometimes it’s best to accept minor defeat, in exchange for fostering a closer, mutually respectful parent-child relationship. Finding other ways to help build a child’s self-esteem or emotional intelligence may be more important in the long-run than bickering over Barbie.

7 Develop emergency tactics

As a last resort, when all else has failed and you find yourself in the depths of a feminist parenting emergency, nonviolent direct action can be deployed. Don’t be afraid to discretely dispose of the Action Man machine gun given by Uncle Bobby last Christmas, or the Bratz bikini set for your four-year-old from your so-called best mate. However, donating an offending item to a charity shop is only dumping the burden onto others!

8 Self-organise

Set up a childcare or home education collective, together with parents or friends who have similar ideals. Providing your own curriculum can be empowering for both adult and child, and give you much needed support. Or start a feminist children’s book club and swap revolutionary bedtime stories.

9 Raise some hell

Getting involved in activism is the best thing a feminist parent can do. If we want our children to live in a world free from oppression, then we need to actively work towards creating a world that is freer and fairer. Parents and carers will continue to be marginalised until we get out there, with our kids, to demand and organise for change. Set a good example. Show your children that they are worth fighting for, and instil in them the courage and confidence to stand up for themselves and their future.

Visit feministchildrearing.blogspot.com for links to related resources