Freedom Socialist • Vol. 29, No. 3 • June-July 2008

A male Marxist celebrates women’s leadership
In praise of female heroes of the working class

by Steven Strauss

Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein, president of the Iraq Electrical Utility Workers Union, leads a protest march against U.S. and Iraqi oil policies on June 4, 2007, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP

Below are portions of a speech given at Johns Hopkins University at an International Women’s Day celebration sponsored by the student group Social Histories.

It is a pleasure and source of pride for me to represent the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) at this wonderful commemoration of the call by socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin in 1910 to raise the banner of International Women’s Day every March 8th. Zetkin, of course, was recalling the March 8, 1857 strike by textile workers in New York City for better working conditions and equal rights for women.

Along with women and socialists throughout the world, we in the Freedom Socialist Party have participated in International Women’s Day every year since our founding in 1966. This year, for example, we will be participating in the rally and demonstration at the site of the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City, where many female wage workers lost their lives. This march is endorsed by many organizations, including Radical Women, a group the FSP works closely with.

Integrating two movements. I want to thank the organizers for doing a magnificent job reminding us of the two most important movements affecting the vast majority of humanity — socialism and feminism. Socialism is for the liberation of workers from the absence of democracy in the workplace, from the tyranny of rule by unelected bosses. Feminism is for the equality of the sexes, the oldest liberation movement on the planet.

We in the Freedom Socialist Party believe that with the historical emergence of the possibility of socialism, the basis for the emancipation of the sexes has become a realistic vision. We also believe that without feminism, the socialist movement will be unsuccessful.

The FSP was born in 1966 from this cross-fertilization. We were active in the anti-Vietnam war movement and observed the damaging effects of male dominance of the leadership of that movement. We believed that the anti-woman behavior in the movement was an obstacle to building the kind of social force needed to get rid of capitalist injustices.

We believed then, and believe today, that the fight for women’s emancipation and socialism are mutually dependent and intimately connected.

On the side of the oppressed. But there is a curious phenomenon among socialists. Some unfortunately regard feminism as “a bourgeois ideology,” fundamentally opposed to socialism. They think that promoting female corporate executives is the only thing feminism can accomplish.

This point of view is narrow. We need to start our approach to the liberation of humanity based on the needs of the most oppressed people.

There’s a profound reason for approaching politics this way. When you stand for the most oppressed people, you can never defend privilege, the hallmark of undemocratic societies. The capitalists defend their right to a privileged life over the workers who produce their wealth. Chauvinist men defend privilege over women by citing religious scriptures or biological pseudoscience.

If we imagine the cries of the most oppressed, our attention will be drawn to places far removed from U.S. corporate ladders.

Across the globe. We might find our eyes first drawn to the women of Saudi Arabia, where a small number of brave women are fighting for the right to hold a drivers license. A drivers license! So they can be independent! They have an organization, called The Committee of Demanders of Women’s Right to Drive. They have presented their demands to the Saudi King.

Their struggle directly challenges the strategic aims of U.S. imperialism, which depends on the rule of the “moderate” patriarchal Saudi family to maintain “stability” and imperialism’s version of peace — the condition in which oppressed people do not fight back. So think about this:  The U.S. rulers know that women fighting for drivers licenses in Saudi Arabia threatens imperialist control!

After Saudi Arabia, our eyes will be drawn to Iraq. The Iraqi trade union movement, which is the decisive force trying to stop U.S. plans to privatize every single Iraqi oilfield, was dramatically strengthened in 2004 with the election of Hashmeya Muhsin Hussein as the first female head of an Iraqi labor union. She‘s the head of the Electrical Utility Workers Union. The Iraqi Federation of Workers’ Trade Unions attributed her victory to “her reputation as a solid defender of workers’ rights and particularly of women’s rights.” She is self-confident, courageous, strong, outspoken.

The lesson of this aspect of the Iraqi union movement is enormous. In the context of an anti-imperialist struggle, Iraqi workers elected their first woman union organizer, a feminist. There’s a deep understanding of who are the leaders of the struggle for workers’ rights and for the rights of the people.

And we cannot leave the tragedy in Iraq without also considering the plight of female members of the U.S. military. You have to dig around a bit for what’s happening to these women, since the truth doesn’t fit well with Pentagon propaganda. According to a Defense Department study, 30% of the more than 500 women soldiers interviewed said they had either been raped or subjected to attempted rape. Women GI’s are advised not to shower or go to the bathroom by themselves. Reuters reported that 70% of the nearly 300 women it interviewed who were suffering from post traumatic stress, reported “sexual trauma.”

Closer to home. Over 41,000 teachers went on strike in Puerto Rico. Most of the education workers are women. They are demanding that classes have no more than 15 students — something any private school for the rich would certainly agree with. And they are demanding that their salaries be doubled, from $19,000 a year to $38,000 a year.

Now, we all know that if teaching were a male profession, the salary would already be $38,000 a year. Why do teachers get paid a pittance? Because the government authorities act as if women workers are just supplementing their husbands’ incomes. And teaching is just an extension of babysitting, until you reach high school, when all of a sudden you start to see more male teachers. At the college level, women have had to fight for their rights and dignity, and equal pay, as faculty members.

The Freedom Socialist Party is proud of the fact that one of our members is the first African American woman to enroll as a doctoral student in philosophy at Columbia University in New York, and she was one of the founders of the teachers’ union there. If she were in this room today, she would join me in supporting the Puerto Rican teachers.

Right here in the United States the Freedom Socialist Party is active in the movement for immigrant rights. This is a workers’ issue. But also a feminist issue. The most reactionary people are as anti-woman as they are anti-Mexican and anti-Arab. The anti-immigrant Minutemen (not Minutewomen) are elements of the future U.S. fascist movement.

Last summer, the Seattle branches of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party participated in the city’s Gay Rights parade. The Minutemen happened to be demonstrating the same day, so we helped turn the parade into a demonstration against the racist and xenophobic Minutemen.

Standing strong together. In the FSP, we understand that there is really no single issue movement. All are connected.

But if they remain separate from each other, neither the workers liberation movement — the socialist movement — nor the women’s liberation movement — the feminist movement — will be victorious. Workers need to take power to democratize the workplace. Then we can finally be in a position to eradicate from the earth the oldest social crime of all, the crime of the patriarchy and the subjugation of women.

If you share this perspective, get involved. Be active in your union. Get your union to fight for women’s rights. Get your feminist organization to support women’s struggles all over the world. And we’d be happy to tell you more about the Freedom Socialist Party.

Long live feminism! Long live the struggle for socialism!   

Steven Strauss is a Baltimore neurologist and passionate proponent of public education and women’s liberation. He can be reached via email at fspbaltimore@hotmail.com.