Workers Vanguard No 752 - 16 February 2001

7/29/2019 Workers Vanguard No 752 - 16 February 2001

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No. 752

a een two days 'in mid-January, Silicon Valley millionaires and janitorsalike were left in the dark as rollingblackouts struck big swathes ofNorthern California. The cause wasnot an earthquake, storm or mechanical failure of the state's aging infrastructure. Rather, the ongoingelectric power crisis in California,which has the sixth-largest economyin the world, has been brought aboutby the anarchic organization ofsociety's productive resources in theinterest of capitalist profits.

Energy Supply, Loot Everyone

Stewart/SF Chronicle AP

Electric bills have been jacked up9 to 15 percent so far and are sure torise far higher; in some cities, likeRiverside, monthly bills have tripledor quadrupled. At the same time, natural gas prices have skyrocketed,driving many working-class familieswho use it for heat and cooking todesperation. The hike in gas priceshas also driven the wholesale price ofelectricity higher still, as the fuel isused by about half the state's powerplants. And it's not just California. Inthe Midwest, families that rely onpropane for heating fuel face livingin freezing homes because "fillingOutages and outrage: Cops attack protesters outside PG&E utility headquarters inSan FranCiSCO, January 10.

the tank for a month can cost more thanthe rent or the mortgage' payment" (NewYork Times, 4 February).wholesale rates. This is exactly whatthey did for two years, siphoning offsome $10 billion to parent corporationsthat made record profits, paying lavishstock dividends and investing elsewhere.Then wholesale prices soared. Last June,the state experienced the largest plannedblackout since World War II. Now theutilities are screaming for the retail ratecap to be abolished.

the sectors of the American capitalistclass whose ability to compete on theworld market will be hamstrung.Liberal consumer advocates are pushing straight-out re-regulation, arguingthat the mission of the utilities should bethe "public interest," selling electricity ata "fair price" for a "fair profit." The reformist left, appealing to the Democrats,is pushing for state and local governments to take over power plants and!or the transmission lines. The GreenParty hypocritcally denounces the blackouts' as a ruse by utilities to force upretail prices, but many environmentalists

16 February 2001

would welcome big price increasesas a way to reduce demand. To thepetty-bourgeois eco-movement, theblackouts are a good thing in princi-ple, since they see the problem asnot too little power but too muchconsumption. Green leader MedeaBenjamin belittled Davis' pleas foreveryone to "conserve" energy onlyfor not being serious enough (DailyCalifornian, 8 February).The government exists to defendnot the "public interest" but the interests of the capitalist class as awhole-first and foremost protect-'ing their riches from the exploitedand oppressed with the armed mightof its police and military. The truthis that this crisis is rooted in the basicworkings of the capitalist system,"regulated" or not. The deregulationof the power and gas industries inCalifornia, launched in 1996 and1998 respectively, was meant to bea showcase for "the magic of themarketplace." Instead it is providinga stark demonstration of the bank-ruptcy of this whole capitalist system, based on enriching the wealthyfew who own the generating plants,factories, refineries, mines ami banks onthe backs-of those who labor. I t is a deadweight around the neck of the population,an obstacle to fulfilling the most basicdaily needs of life.The only way forward lies through aworkers revolution that will create aworkers government, seize the productiveforces from the capitalist owners-fromL.A. and San Francisco to Houstonand Wall Street-and forge a socialistplanned economy. This alone can create agenuinely egalitarian society, based noton scarcity and a regression in technology

continued on page 10

While oil, gas and electricity interestsare raking it in, other capitalists, especially in the California epicenter of thehigh-tech boom, are starting to lose serious money. Last month 's power cuts costthe state's economy $1.7 billion in oneweek alone. Intel CEO Craig Barrettdeclared there 'Was "not a chance" hiscompany would now expand in SiliconValley anytime soon. As "stage threealerts," triggered when eleptricity demandis dangerously close to the available supply, extend into their fifth straight week,this debacle is certain to deepen the economic downturn already beginning in thecountry as a whole.Currently the two largest state utilities,Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) andSouthern California Edison, teeter on theedge of bankruptcy. They blame a deregulation scheme that requires them to buyat any price on the wholesale marketwhile selling at a retail price set whenderegulation went into effect in 1996. Atthe time, the utilities bet that they wouldmake a killing from the then much lower

Declaring deregulation a "colossal anddangerous failure," California's Democratic governor, Gray Davis, wants thefederal government to set a wholesaleelectricity price cap. Meanwhile, he'smoving to bail out'the utilities-at a costof at least $10 billion-by guaranteeingtheir debts and having the state government broker long-term contracts at lowerwholesale prices (but still substantiallyabove current retail rates). WOMEN AND THE

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Even fellow "new Democrat" Clintonresisted Davis' pleas for a wholesale ratecap. The Bush White House is not onlyideologically opposed to the idea, butsome of George W.'s best friends andbiggest financial backers are the heads ofTexas-based power companies like Enronand Reliant which are currently triplingor quadrupling their profits from the California fiasco. And this is not to mentionthe Bush family's longstanding personalties to the Oil Patch. Everyone in thechambers and corridors of power knowselectricity bills will soar. And this is badnews for everyone from the middle classto workers and the poor-as well as for


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Revolutionary Leadership andthe Fight Against Klan TerrorThe PDC mobilization went ahead onJanuary 20th despite the lack of a permit.As we walked, in single file line towardthe Gary Court House, the Gary policewere out in strength. Mayor King hadstated that anyone who demonstrated inthe streets of Gary would be arrested. Butthe police never moved in to arrest anydemonstrator, only handing out one citation. We began to understand the scope ofwhat we were a part of. It was because

of the number of powerful trade. unionsrepresented at the mobilization, the ATUand the USWA among others, and faxesof support from organizations and tradeunions from around the country and theworld that had flooded Mayor King'soffice, that the police backed down. Thepower of labor had won.

Dear Young Spartacus,I am writing this letter to comment

on the January 20, 2001 Partisan Defense Committee LaborlBlack Mobilization against the KKK in Gary, Indiana.The event was the first mobilization of itstype in which I have been involved. Itgave me insight into the power of laborand the need for a party of and for the

Young Sparlacusinterests of the proletariat that will fightfor a communist future.Karl Marx wrote in The CommunistManifesto: "All that is solid melts intoair, all that is holy is profaned, and manis at last compelled to face with sobersenses, his real conditions of life, and hisrelations with his kind." And as fivefriends from Richmond, Virginia piledinto a rented car, heading northwestthrough fog .and rain, mountains andsnow, for fourteen hours one way, wewere to learn lessons in Marxism thatwe would never be able to understandthrough reading alone. We were to see

Marxism in concrete terms: in the streetsof Gary, a company town, shadowed bythe state but in the midst of the powerof labor. We were "compelled to face withsober senses the real conditions."During our trip, we were unaware ofthe developments taking place in the

The French Revolutionand the Proletariat

The radical sector of the bourgeoisie thatcarried out the Great French Revolution of1789-94 proclaimed the ideals of "Liberty,Equality, Fraternity." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels embraced the egalitarian heritage of the French Revolution. But theyexplained that the formal equality championed by the bourgeoisie against the aris-TROTSKY toe racy did not and could not satisfy the LENINdemand of the emerging proletariat forsocial equality, which could only be realized through the overthrow of the capitalistsystem of exploitation and the creation ofa classless communist society.

The demand for liberation from felidal fetters and the establishment of equality ofrights by the abolition of feudal inequalities was bound soon to assume wider dimensions from the moment when the economic advance of society first placed it on theorder of the day ... .From the moment when, like a butterfly from the chrysalis, the bourgeoisie aroseout of the burghers of the feudal period, when this "estate" of the Middle Ages developed into a class of modern society, it was always and inevitably accompanied by itsshadow, the proletariat. And in the same way the bourgeois demand for equality wasaccompanied by the proletarian demand for equality. From the moment when the bourgeois demand for the abolition of class privileges was put forward, alongside of itappeared the proletarian demand for the abolition of the classes themselves-at first inreligious form, basing itself on primitive C h ~ s t i a n i t y , and later drawing support fromthe bourgeois equalitarian theories themselves. The proletarians took the bourgeoisie attheir word: equality must not be merely apparent, must not apply merely to the sphereof the state, but must also be real, must be extended to the social and' economic sphere.And especially since the time when the French bourgeoisie, from the Great Revolutionon, brought bourgeois equality to the forefront, the French proletariat has answered itblow for blow with the demand for social and economic equality, and equality hasbecome the tlattle-cry particularly of the French proletariat.

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- Friedrich Engels, Anti-Diihring (1878)

! . ~ ! l l ! . . ! ! o r . . 4 . . ' ! . . f ! ! ! ~ I ! . I ! . . EDITOR: Len MeyersEDITOR, YOUNG SPARTACUS PAGES: Anna WoodmanPRODUCTION MANAGER: Susan FullerCIRCULATION MANAGER: Mara CadizEDITORIAL BOARD: Barry James (managing editor), Bruce Andre, Ray Bishop, Jon Brule,George Foster, Liz Gordon, Walter Jennings, Jane Kerrigan, James Robertson, Joseph Seymour,Alison Spencer .The Spartacist League is the U.S. Section of the International Communist League (FourthInternationalist)Workers Vanguard (ISSN 0276-0746) published biweekly, except skipping three alternate issues in June, July andAugust (beginning with omitting the second issue in June) and with a 3-week interval in December, by the SpartacistPublishing Co., 299 Broadway, Suite 318, New York, NY 10007. Telephone: (212) 732-7862 (Editorial), (212) 732-7861(BUSiness). Address all correspondence to: Box 1377,GPO, New York, NY 10116. E-mail address:[email protected] subscriptions: $10.00/22 issues. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY. POSTMASTER: Send addresschanges to Workers Vanguard, Box 1377, GPO, New York, NY 10116.Opinions expressed in signed articles Qr letters do not necessarily express the editorial viewpoint.The closing date for news in this issue is February 13,

No. 752 16 February 2001

January 20POe-initiatedanti-Klan rallyin Gary,Indiana.

days prior to the Mobilization. The KKKand the PDC had been denied permits todemonstrate. The PDC had been stonewalled through legal avenues, n!1melythe courts, in their determination to maketheir actions legal. But there was alsothe understanding that the working classshould not put its reliance in the bourgeois courts. The KKK, on the otherhand, filed a lawsuit with the ACLU,whose legal position was that the Klan'sFirst Amendment Rights were beingviolated. But the Klan, as blacks are alltoo familiar, are racist terrorists. As thePDC's Mobilization leaflet "All Out toStop the KKK" succinctly stated: "theKlan 'speaks' with the lynch rope. Thefascists' 'words' are fired out of the barrel of a gun."We had driven from Richmond, a townwhere museums are dedicated to the Confederate soldiers and battles. MonumentAvenue, which runs through the heart ofthe Fan neighborhood, is lined with enormous statues hailing the racist likes ofRobert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.These monuments are indicative of whostill runs Richmond, and the South, a. hundred and thirty-six years after theConfederacy was defeated by the UnionArmy.We discussed the events at Greensboroin 1979 and in New York City on October23, 1999 but perhaps we were not trulyaware of what lay ahead as our car rambled through Gary toward Chicago, thewind outside cutting to the bone, and theextent of industrialization in the area werealized through miles of factories along1-65 and 1-90.

Marx also wrote: "Now and then theworkers are victorious, but only for atime. The real fruit of their battles lies,not in the immediate result, but in theever-expanding union of the workers."And the workers are the only groupthat has the power to smash fascism inits place whenever it raises its cowardlyhead. I f fascism is to prevail, the working class is the group whose trade unionsare made illegal, whose newspapers arecensored and whose rights are takenaway. Trotsky wrote in 1934: "Thegrowth of the fascist bands is, in turn, aproduct of the ruin of the petty bourgeoisie." And as capitalism continues todecay, "big capital ruins the middleclasses and then, with the help of hiredfascist demagogues, incites the despairing petty bourgeois against the worker.The bourgeois regime can be preservedonly by such" murderous means asthese .... Until it is overthrown by proletarian revolution."These are some of the' lessons that welearned in Gary. We leallled, in concreteterms, the power that labor wields, and theneed for a workers party that will fightfor socialist revolution. The proletariatneeds a party to break from the Democrats, the party of illusions in which theworking class has no interest. It was blackDemocrat Al Sharpton who raised thecall for "tolerance" for the KKK, alongwith the New York Civil Liberties Unionand fake socialists like the InternationalSocialist Organization during the October 23,1999 PDC LaborlBlack Mobilization to shut down a KKK demonstrationin NYC.And as the Workers Vanguard "Labor!Black Mobilization" supplement (November 1, 1999) stated: ''We! need a workers party that fights for a workers government to rip the means of production fromthe capitalist class and institute a plannedsocialist economy that operates not forthe profit of a few greedy exploiters butfor the working people who produce th ewealth of society." Comradely,Josh K.Richmond, VA

Black History Month ForumsThe Defeat of Reconstruction and the Great Rail Strike of 1877:

Saturday, February 24, 3 p.m.Harvard University, Science Center Hall EBaSiON

'.,.',',.".'.lI",.',.... ". ...........,.e,. ,, :,'.: : : . ~ . : . : I : . .

} ' l ( . ' i ~ . , . , t " . ; ,

For more information: (617) 666-9453

, ~ . ~ ~ " t i _ " " } ' S.ciaJisl

Saturday, February 17, 5 p.m.University of Chicago, Third Floor Theatre, Ida Noyes1212 E. 59th Street (at Woodlawn)For more information: (312) 454-4930

Forums will include reports from successful labor/blackmobilization to stop the KKK in Gary, Indiana on January 20!WORKERS VANGUARD


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Mexico City: Student ActivistsOccupy UNAM CampusDrop All Charges!

MEXICO CITY-On February 6, the students of Mexico City's National Autonomous University (UNAM) commemorated the one-year anniversary of thebrutal police suppression of the tenmonth-long strike in defense of the rightto free, public education, in which nearlya thousand student activists were imprisoned and the campus facilities were pccupied by the Federal Preventive Police.Students' assemblies from several DNAMschools decided to carry out a 24-houroccupation beginning on the night of February 5, and two massive demonstrationsthe next day. Both demonstrations wereheld in defiance,of recent threats by thePRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) city government to outlaw andattack any protest that might block traffic. During the stoppage, the universityworkers union (STUNAM) refused towork in the occupied facilities. The following is an eyewitness account from acomrade of the Juventud Espartaquista(JE), youth group of the InternationalCommunist League's Mexican section,the Grupo Espartaquista de Mexico(GEM), who was present at the PoliticalSciences school when the studentsdefeated an intended provocation by 35strikebreakers.

* * *There were about 100 activists, half ofwhom were women, staying overnight toguard the school of Political Sciences.Due to rumors about some hired thugs(porros) hiding in the local administration building and keeping in mind a previous attack at the School of Engineeringwhere an activist ended up in the hospital, the activists' meeting decided around

APMexico City,. February 6: Student march marked 'one-year anniversary ofgovernment crackdown on 10-month-long strike at UNAM.I :00 a.m. to go all together and check thefacilities. It turned out that there were 35thugs, including campus functionariesand teachers, whose explicit purpose wasto break the occupation. When we enteredthe room where the porros were gathered,several of them began to arm themselveswith pipes, looking for a physical confrontation. Given our numerical superiority, we proceeded to surround them andtake them out to the square. We took theirpipes away. Many students were shockedto see some of their teachers playing therole of vicious strikebreaking thugs.When we finally managed to get them alltogether and seated at the center of thesquare, the students began to demand thatthe porros take off their pants and shoes(with the exception of the three womenamong them), chanting "Mexe! Mexe!"This was a reference to the famous episode just two weeks after the governmentcrackdown on the UNAM strike in Mexico City, when the population of the village around the El Mexe teachers school

prevented a police squad from capturingthe striking students, tying up the copsand forcing them to strip in the centralsquare. As some of the student activistswere taking the shoes away from their"prisoners," they shouted, "Now youknow how our indigenous brothers feel!"One of the thugs grotesquely whined,"These are Maoist methods!" Comingfrom a right-wing strikebreaker, this washardly an insult. As he refused until theend to take his pants off, the students tookthem off forcibly. Some of us thought it.would be a beautiful irony to make these. hugs vote as to whom they wanted to.donate their pants and shoes: to the earthquake victims of El Salvador or India orto the indigt;nous Zapatista villages undermilitary siege.There were a lot of different groupsand tendencies among the students,reflecting acute political differences, butit took the joint action of all of us to putthe strikebreakers under control. Later on,the students tool,c a vote and decided to

give them their clothes back. When themedia finally showed up in response toour call, a student read a statementexplaining what had occurred and thestrikebreakers were released, after beinggently escorted a few blocks away fromany other occupied campus building. Thissuccessful .defensive action may havehelped persuade the strikebreaking thugsat other schools against carrying out s imilar attempts as they had threatened. Nowmany of the student activists are facing charges in the university tribunal amida witchhunt by the vengeful universityauthorities and the bourgeois media. It isurgently necessary to mobilize the powerof the workers to defend the student activists! Drop all the charges!The JE intervened in this defensiveaction, counterposing our proletarian revolutionary views to those of other groupswithin the student movement. We sharplyexposed the arrogant program of "studentvanguardism" that rejects the centrality ofthe working class and fosters the illusionthat students can, by themselves, solvethe contradictions of the whole society byturning the campus into an isolated "territory of justice" within capitalism. Thisprogram is advanced by organizationslike the left-wing student group ~ E n Lucha," and is doomed to capitulate to theruling class, seeking to reform capitalismrather than destroy it and replace it withan egalitarian socialist society wherethose who labor rule. Grotesquely, someof En Lucha's top leaders have denounced the victory of the students overthis strikebreaking provOCation as a "mistake" (La Jomada, 9 February), objectively embracing the witchhunt launchedby the university authorities. The JE, atraining ground for future communistcadre, fights to win over radicalized youthto struggle at the side of the workers toachieve proletarian class dictatorshipthrough socialist revolution. Join us!.

Six Degrees of the Democratic PartyOn January 24, a new movement waslaunched at UC Berkeley with a forumcalled by the fledgling Progressive Student Alliance (PSA), which unites unaffiliated political students with the racist,capitalist Democratic Party and its associated single-issue auxiliaries in theACLU, CaIPIRG, Queer Resource Center, the Cal Human Rights ~ a m p a i g n andeven the Cal Vegetarians. But far from acynical ploy launched by the Democrats

to lure disillusioned students back intothe fold, the real blame lies with the fakesocialists of Solidarity and the International Socialist Organization (ISO), without whose organizational savvy and flyerfoot-soldiering the PSA could well dissolve into a hazy mist of liberal goodintentions, and without whose left coverthe PSA's nature as a prop to capitalistrule would be immediately apparent tothe most naive student.But special distinction must be given toProgressive Labor (PL) who, though nolonger members, provided the red eggshell which protected the PSA while itwas still in its embryonic form as Students for Nader (SFN). In our article16 FEBRUARY 2001

"Progressive Labor Crawls for Nader"(WV No. 746, 17 November 2000), wedetailed PL's entry into SFN and its craven kowtowing before campus liberals.PL's press attacked Nader as a b o u r ~ geois candidate, but when faced with theunpopularity of "fighting for communism" among liberal students, PL foundthat "We made our first mistake at thevery first meeting by openly attackingNader ... We were written off as 'outsiders'" (Challenge, 15 November 2000).Where revolutionaries seek to win youngpeople to the need for the revolutionaryoverthrow of racist U.S. imperialism, PLillustrated its own opportunism in preferring to "develop friendships," "buildclose ties," and "find the points of unity."From there, it was only a short step tofawning messages to the SFN e-mail list,with PL members cooing "I think it'sgoing to take a revolution, and some inStudents for Nader disagree. But I thinkwe are overall on the same side .. .. I'mglad I joined." Even when faced with anSFN member's support of RepublicanJohn McCain as an advocate of campaign finance reform, PL members were

careful not to step on those "friend-. ships," replying cordially that "What unifies us is our desire for a drastic changein the way the system operates. Personally, having John McCain in the coalitionI feel would jeopardize that heinously."No kidding.While PL provided the shiniest possible red veneer to the same old liberalcrap, the Spartacus Youth Club explainedthat Nader's campaign aimed to refurbishthe image of the capitalist electoralsystem, and.. therefore to channel thosediscontented with this society toward theDemocratic Party. The role of capitalistthird party movements in the U.S. hasbeen to divert anger among the massesaway from social protest and back intothe dead end of bourgeois electoral politics. In seeking to prettify a system whichhas black oppression at its core, Naderhad little support from blacks, and evenless to offer them. But instead of exposing Nader's intentional indifference toracism, PL sought to provide him withsome progressive credentials. In thesame 15 November Challenge articletitled "Nader Student Group Won to Anti-

Racist Stand," PL wrote: "Once we feltmore comfortable in the group, we'upped the ante' at the weekly meeting.We pointed out that the group was predominantly white, and that we should tryto change this .... We proposed a prisonlabor forum highlighting racism whichcould attract more minority students."At that prison labor forum a Spartacistsupporter intervened to point out that thecontinued on page 11

Down Wfth NAFTA "Free Trade"Rape ofMexico!For Workers Revolution

in Mexico!Mexican Army Out of Chiapas!Beware of Peace Talks Fraud!Wednesday, February 21,7 p.m.UCLA Ackerman 3508For more Information: (213) 380-8239

LOS ANGELES3


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Our comrade Susan Adams died athome on the morning of February 6after a two-year struggle with cancer.In her 30 years as a communist cadre,Susan served on many". of the battlefronts of our international party. Thereis hardly a section of the InternationalCommunist League or an area of ourwork which did not benefit directlyfrom her political counsel and from herexceptional talents as a teacher andtrainer of a new generation of proletarian leaders. She continued to carry outvital work as a member of the leadingcommittees of the Spartacist League!U.S. and the ICL until her death. Wesalute her memory and share in the painand loss of her longtime companion andcomrade, F r a n ~ o i s , her family and hermany comrades and friends around theworld.Like thousands of youth, Susan waspropelled into political activism in themid-1960s by the civil rights movement, the growing opposition to theVietnam War and the near-revolutionaryupheaval in France in May 1968. Shevehemently rejected the mysticism andhypocritical moralism of her Catholicbackground and struggled against theinternalized oppression that it caused.While at the University of California inSan Diego, she joined Students for aDemocratic Society (SDS) and wasdrawn to the pro-working-class wingled by the left-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party. Susan was won to Trotskyismas she began working with the SL-ledRevolutionary Marxist Caucus of SDSin 1970 after moving to the State University of New York in Stony Brook.Having moved back to California, shebecame a member of the SpartacistLeague in December 1971. Withinmonths, she was elected organizer o f ourrapidly growing Bay Area local committee,helping to integrate new recruitsfrom a variety of political tendencies.

When we moved to set up a branch in the "MotorCity," Detroit, in early 1973, Susan was chosen tolead it. She proudly described this center of theblack industrial working class as the Vyborg of theAmerican proletariat, in reference to the militantproletarian stronghold of Bolshevism in Petrogradon the eve of the Russian Revolution. She wasaggressive in ensuring that our Trotskyist propaganda penetrated the combative proletariat in theauto plants, often taking a direct hand in writing,mimeographing and distributing our first leaflets.Susan saw to it that the local carried out a programof intensive Marxist internal education and that theindustrial comrades, who were working 50 hours ormore on swing shift on the assembly lines, got theirshare of polemical combat doing campus work.After little more than a year in Detroit, Susanmoved to New York to be the central leader of ournational youth organization, the Spartacus YouthLeague. As always, she took on this task with energyand political determination, frequently touring thelocals, initiating or directing local and national SYLcampaigns, overseeing the publication of a highlevel monthly press, Young Spartacus, with anemphasis on Marxist education and polemics.'In 1976, as the Spartacist tendency began to gainsmall 'footholds in Europe, Susan took on anothercrucial area of party work, this time for our International Secretariat. Stationed mainly in Paris, shebecame the central leader of our work in Europe, andParis became one of three main political centers ofour International. Until 1992, Susan was the principal leader of the Ligue Trotskyste de France. Shewas centrally involved in the debates and discussions undertaken in the LTF and the International tohammer out our strategy and tactics in this.interna

tional center of ostensible Trotskyism, particularlyin response to the resurgence of the popular front inthe form of the "Union ofthe Left" in the late 1970sand early '80s. Determined to implant the Cannonist understanding of party building and Bolsheviknorms of functioning which were largely alien toEuropean cadre, she worked closely with often inexperienced leaderships in the European sections, getting them to seize on opportunities for building theparty, to carry through regroupments with leftwardmoving elements of opponent organizations and tocombat the incessant pressures of French parocialism, British Labourism, resurgent German nationalism and so on.

Susan Adams

1948-2001In July 1994, helping to redirect the work of the'ICL in a genuinely new and difficult period signaledby capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union,Susan wrote a letter to the International Secretariat:"The main task of the I.S. is the production of theappropriate, necessary and urgent literary propaganda, quadrilingually and in part pentalingually,i.e., also in Russian, mainly in the Spartacists ...Publishing propaganda presumably gives politicaldirection; it creates the scaffolding inside which thesections construct their work, in the spirit that Lenindeveloped in What Is To Be Done?"When the incipient proletarian political revolutionerupted in East Germany In the fall of 1989, Susan

of course threw herself into guiding and pushing forward our Trotskyist intervention, playing a majorrole in building the united-front mobilization weinitiated to protest the fascist desecration of a Sovietwar memorial, which drew 250,000 people to 'EastBerlin's Treptow Park on 3 January 1990.In 1992, when the LTF leadership itself succumbed to the same pressures Susan had seen soclearly and fought so well elsewhere, there was asharp political fight at an ICL conference. Susansought to assimilate the political lessons of the fightand only a few months later accepted the difficultassignment of heading up our small ICL station inMoscow, taking up the work of our comrade MarthaPhillips who had been murdered at her pos t, thereearlier that year. Working in a situation where therewas little room for mistakes, our Moscow group

fought to reimplant Bolshevism in theface of the devastation of capitalistcounterrevolution and of the retrogradeStalinist-derived -chauvinists of the"red-brown" coalition.Although foreign languages did notcome easily, Susan embarked on learning Russian with the same disciplineand resolution that she had applied tostudying French. The combination oflimited party resources and the overwhelmingly negative objective situationin the former Soviet Union ultimatelyforced us to abandon an organized presence in Moscow. To her last days,Susan would speak fondly of her "Moscow boys," as she called the youngmembers from various countries,among them recent recruits from theformer DDR, who had volunteered forthis arduous and dangerous assignmentand who received their shaping as Leninist cadre under Susan's tutelage.After nearly 20 years of overseasassignments, Susan returned to the U.S.to work in the central party administration, directing her energies particularlyon working with a new layer of youthrecruits in New York and nationally.Seeking to capitalize on our very successful anti-Klan mobilization in October 1999, Susan addressed the NewYork Spartacist branch, of which shewas political chairman:"This demonstration really does putinto context the last decade, when therewasn't very much going on. In the lastcouple of years, there have been manystruggles in the party. We have soughtto grind off the rust in the party andprepare ourselves for ~ x a c t l y the kind

of situation that I think our party responded to very well this month. Andnow the question is the follow-up. Inshort, the whole point here is: this iswhat we live for, this is what we prepare for, and now we're in it and wemust take advantage of it in the maximum political way."During this period she also devotedmuch of her waning energy to preparing her public presentation on "Women and theFrench Revolution" and expanding it for publication. Even while homebound in her last few days,she was involved in helping select graphics for thelayout. Several of her other projects remain to becompleted, including an index for the first boundvolume of French-language Spartacist.Susan's beauty and graciousness struck all whomet her. She solicited and listened intently to theopinions of the newest youth member no less thanthose of the most senior party cadre, arguing withthem openly when she disagreed. Her intellectualcuriosity was intense and manyof us fondly remember sharing a book-shopping expedition, a novel, aShostakovich symphony, an art exhibit or a playwith Susan in whatever city of the world we foundourselves. Her critical-mindedness, integrity andrevolutionary determination serve as an inspirationto us all as we go forward to realize the task to whichshe dedicated her life, the reforging of a TrotskyistFourth International and.the achievement of communism worldwide.

Memorial MeetingsMemorial meetings are planned in several

cities-Berlin: February 24, for information call:(030) 4 43 94 00; Paris: March 3, for informationcall: 01 420801 49; New York: March 3, for information call: (212) 267-1025.

SpartakistEast Berlin, 14 January 1990: Susan (at left) with Spartakist contingent at demonstrationhonoring Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg during inCipient political revolution.

WORKERS VANGUARD


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OMEN AND THE

BullozOctober 1789: Parisian women armed with pikes, the "people's weapon," march on the royal palace at Versailles toprotest counterrevolutionary outrages and demand bread.Throughout her years as a communist,our comrade Susan Adams had an intensecommitment to the study of history andculture, which she put to particular useas a member of the Editorial Board ofWomen and Revolution while that jour-nal existed. We publish below an editedversion of a presentation she gave at aSpartacist League forum to celebrateInternational Women's Day in New YorkCity last year.International Women's Day originated

in March 1908, with a demonstrationhere in Manhattan by women needletrades workers. They marched to opposechild labor and in favor of the eighthour day and women's suffrage. March8 became an international day celebrating the struggle for women's rights.And then on International Women's Dayin 1917, right in the middle of WorldWar I, 90,000 textile workers, many ofthem women, went on strike in Petrograd(St. Petersburg), the capital of the Russian tsarist empire. They rose up fromthe very bottom rungs of society, andit was these most oppressed and downtrodden of the proletariat who openedthe sluice gates ofthe revolutionary struggle leading to the October Revolution,where Marx's ideas first took on flesh andblood.The Soviet state was the dictatorshipof the proletariat. It immediately enactedlaws making marriage and divorce simplecivil procedures, abolishing the categoryof illegitimacy and all discriminationagainst homosexuals. It took steps towardreplacing women's household drudgeryby setting up cafeterias, laundries andchildcarecenters to allow women to enterproductive employment. Under the conditions of extreme poverty and backwardness, those measures could be carriedout only on a very limited scale. But theyundermined the institution of the familyand represented the first steps towardthe liberation of women. The collectivized planned economy laid the basis forenormous economic and social progress.Fully integrated into the economy aswage earners; women achieved a degreeof economic independence that becameso much a matter of course that it wasbarely noticed by the third generationafter the revolution. We fought for unconditional military defense of the SovietUnion against imperialist attack andinternal counterrevolution up until thevery last barricade.The great October Russian Revolu. tion has now been undone and its gainsdestroyed. Surrounded and pounded bythe imperialists for seven decades, the16 FEBRUARY 2001

Soviet Union was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991 c92. Theresponsibility for that lies primarily withthe Stalinist bureaucracy which usurpedpolitical power from the working classin 1923-24 and betrayed the revolutionary purpose of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party and the revolutionary Communist International that they founded.Not the least of the Stalinists' crimes wasthe glorification of the family and thereversal of many gains for women. Wecalled for a proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy andreturn to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.In celebrating International Women'sDay, we reaffirm that the struggle forwomen's rights is inextricably linked torevolution and we honor the wome'nfighters through the centuries whosecourage and consciousness has often putthem in the vanguard of struggles toadvance the cause of the oppressed. TheRussian Revolution' was a proletariansocialist revolution; it overthrew the ruleof the capitalists and landlords and placedthe working class in power. The Great, French Revolution of 1789-94 was abourgeois revolution, the most thoroughand deepgoing of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries.The French Revolution overthrew therule of the monarchy, the nobility and theianded aristocracy and placed the bourgeoisie in power. It swept Europe withits liberating ideas and 'its revolutionaryreorganization of society. It transformedthe population from subjects of the crownto citizens with formal equality. lews

were freed from the ghettos and declaredcitizens with full rights; slavery was firstabolished on the territory of the Frenchnation. It inspired the first successfulslave revolt in the colonies, the uprisingled by Toussaint L'Ouverture in whatbecame Haiti. And, within the limitationsof bourgeois rule, it achieved gains forwomen that were unparalleled until thetime of the Bolshevik Revolution.Today's capitalist ruling class is unsurpassed in bloody terrorism against working people around the world in defenseof its profits and property. As hard as itis to imagine, the ancestors of this bourgeoisie played a historically progressiverole then, sweeping away the backwardness, irrationality and inefficiency of theprevious feudal system. The leaders ofthe French Revolution, who representedthe most radical sector of the Frenchbourgeoisie, spoke with-and for themost part believed-the words of theEnlightenment, justifying its fight todestroy the nobility as a class and takepolitical power itself as the advent of"liberty, equality and fraternity" for all.They could not, and the majority of themdid not intend to, emancipate the lowerclasses. Nevertheless, something changedin the world.Particularly since "death of communism" propaganda has filled the bourgeois press and media following thedestruction of the Soviet Union, there'sbeen a real attempt to demonize notjust the Russian Revolution but any revoltition, the French Revolution in particular. The push for retrograde social

VAAPMarch 1917: Petrograd women march with banner reading, ' ~ s long as womenare slaves there can't be freedom. Long live women's equality!" Earlierprotest on International Women's Day marked start of Russian Revolution.

policies has been historically justifiedwith a virtual flood of books and articles attacking the humanist values ofthe Enlightenment philosophy which laidthe ideological basis for the French Revolution. Today, while the bourgeoisie inits decay disowns the rationalist and democratic values it once espoused, we Trotskyists stand out not only as the party ofthe Russian Revolution but the champions of the liberating goals of the FrenchRevolution. .Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin identifiedwiththe Jacobins, the radical wing of theFrench revolutionary bourgeoisie, whosemost prominent leaders were MaximilienRobespierre, lean-Paul Marat and LouisAntoine de Saint-lust. Lenin wrote thatthe "essence of lacobinism" was "thetransfer of power to the revolutionary,oppressed class" and that lacobinism was"one of the highest peaks in the emancipation struggle of an oppressed class."You can better understand why Lenin wasinspired by the lacobins from the following words by Saint-lust: ''Those whomake a revolution with half-measures areonly digging their own grave."Women's Oppressionand Class Society

In the early 19th century, a Frenchsocialist named Charles Fourier carefullystudied the French Revolution. He wrotebiting, witty and humorous criticism ofexisting social relations, including working out a whole scheme-kind of nuttybut fun and food for thought-for perpetually satisfying sexualrelations. Needlessto say, he thought sexual monogamy wasa curse worse than death. In a famousstatement quoted by Karl Marx in his1845 book The Holy Family, Fourier said:"The change in a historical epoch canalways be determined by women's progress towards fr-eedom, because here,in the relation of woman to man, ofthe weak to the strong, the victory ofhuman nature over brutality is mostevident. The degree of emancipation ofwoman is the natural measure of generalemancipation."And that quite profound observationguides us today in our understanding ofsociety.Women's oppression is rooted in theinstitution of the family and has beena feature of all class societies. At onepoint before recorded history, it didn'tmuch matter who the father of a childwas, since children were largely caredfor communally. But then inventionssuch as agriculture made it possible toproduce more than the producers couldactually consume. This ability to producecontinued on page 6

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FrenchRevolution...(continued from page 5)a surplus meant that a leisure classcould live off the labor of othersand accumulate property. It becameimportant ,to know who the father ofa child was so that he could passon his property to his own children.Monogamy appeared, making theman dominant and the woman subservient, enslaved.

The family is a key social unit forthe maintenance of capitalism. Forthe capitalists, the family providesthe basis for passing on accumulatedwealth. And where there is no property to pass on, the family servesto rear the next generation of workers for the capitalists and to inculcateconservative social values. It is thefamily-and the necessity to controlsexual access to the woman to ensurethat the man knows who his real heiris-which generates the moralitycodified in and reinforced by religion. It is the family which throughouta woman's life gives definition to heroppressed state: as daughter, as wife,as mother.We Marxists fight to rip the meansof production out of the hands of thecapitalists in order to put them atthe service of the needs of the work

masses are no longer willing to beruled in the same w[j,y. We're talkingabout a political crisis in which therulers falter and which tears the people from the habitmil conditionsunder which they labor and vegetate,awakening even the most backwardelements, compelling the people totake stock of themselves and lookaround. That political crisis was provoked in France by the 1776 American Revolution.France had taken the side of theAmerican colonies against its perpetual enemy England and-so hademerged on the side of the victors,but totally broke. In May 1789, KingLouis XVI convened an Estates Gen-eral-a meeting of representatives ofthe nobility, the clergy and the nonnoble property owners and lawyers(the so-called Third Estate) -a tVersailles, where his palace was located,about 12 miles from Paris. He hopedto convince some of them to paymore taxes. But they refused, whileevery village throughout the countrywrote up its grievances to be presented at Versailles. The meeting ofthe three estates transformed itselfinto a National Assembly.

ing people that create the wealth.Only then can household drudgery bereplaced with socialized childcare,restaurants, laundries and so on. The program of communism is for a classlesssociety in which the family is transcendedby superior sexual and social relationswhich will be free of moral or economiccoercion. Our slogan is: "For women'sliberation through socialist revolution!"

14 July 1789: Depiction of storming of Bastille prison and garrison by Parisianworking people. Right: Parisian sans-culottes.

It was clear that the king was gathering troops to disperse the NationalAssembly. The negotiations out atVersailles might have gone on forever, except the Parisian masses tookthings into their own capable handsand organized to arm themselves,seizing 60,000 muskets from armories like the Invalides and the Bastille

Marx said that revolution is the locomotive of history. In the Great FrenchRevolution, the women of Paris wereoften the engineers in that locomotive.I' m going to be talking about the roleof thousands of women leaders, militarycommanders, propagandists and organizers whose role at key junctures ofthe French Revolution was quite simply

decisive. Groups like the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women literallyshaped history. Count Mirabeau, one ofthe major actors in the beginning of therevolution, was an extremely sleazy guy,firmly in favor of a constitutional monarchy, occasionally in the pay of the king.But even he said: "Without women, thereis no revolution."

Most histories of the French Revolution concentrate their chief attention onthe upper levels of society and the toplayers of the plebeian masses. In recentyears, a number of French and American women historians have done veryinteresting and important research intothe dusty archives of the revolution inParis-police reports, newspaper articles.Some of these historians are feminists;that is, they see the fundamental division .in society as that between the sexes.

At the time of the revolution, a movement focused specifically on women'srights was in the minority. One personwho was what you would call a femi-6

nist today, at least as far as I have beenable to put together her history, wasOlympe de Gouges. In her pamphlet,The Declaration of the Rights of Womanand Female Citizen, written in the fall of1791, she implicitly called for the votefor women, for a women's assembly andfor equal rights with men. She also dedicated her pamphlet to the despised queenMarie Antoinette! De Gouges was not anaristocrat but a butcher's daughter fromoutside Paris, yet she remained a royalistthroughout most of the revolution andwas guillotined in November 1793.Some of the recent analysis by feministhistorians feeds right into today's reac-

Contemporaryprint shows May1791 decreegiving civilrights to freeblack men andDeclaration ofRights of Man.Reason Is seenholding a levelto symbolizeequality of blackand white.

tionary climate. Taking aim at the FrenchRevolution itself, they claim that the failure of women to secure the right to votefor national parliaments and the suppression ofthe exclusively women's politicalclubs during the most radical period ofthe revolution proves that misogyny triumphed. This view is also promoted inan article in the New York Times Maga-zine (16 May 1999) called "The ShadowStory of the Millennium: W o m e ~ . " Thearticle states that the French Revolution's"new philosophy of rational natural rightsplaced all men on an equal footing inregard to citizenship and the law" butadds: "Men of the revolution said thatwomen should stay home and rear theirsons to be good citizens."Let us allow a participant to r efute thisfaisehood.' Mere Duchesne was a domestic servant, a cook, who, unlike mostdomestic servants then, defied her aristocratic masters. She was described in apolice report as "the satellite and missionary to all women under Robespierre's

orders, a most ferocious woman." TheMere Duchesne newspaper wrote in September 1792:"In the past, when we wanted to speak,our mouths were shut while we weretold very politely, 'You reason like awoman'; almost like a goddamn beast.Oh! Damn! Everything is very differentnow; we have indeed grown since theRevolution."

, "The Columns ofFrench Liberty"Now I want to go into some detailabout the French Revolution itself. Arevolution is a monumental militaryand social battle between classes. Thedominant class in any society controlsthe state-the police, courts, armywhich protects its class interests. In modern society there are two fundamentalclasses: the big capitalists who own themeans of production (the mines, facto-

,ries, etc.) and the workers who ownabsolutely nothing except their personal effects and are compelled to selltheir labor power to the capitalists. Atthe time pf the French Revolution, therewere essentially four classes. The kingand the nobility who owned nearly allof the land, the rising bourgeoisie, thepeasants (who constituted over 80 percentof the population) and the urban sans-culottes. The latter consisted of artisans,who worked either at home or in verysmall workshops, shopkeepers, day laborers, the poor and unemployed. Those whodid manual labor wore loose trousers and,were sans-without-the tight silk leggings worn by aristocrats and those imitating them.A revolution happens when the rulingclass can no longer rule as before, and the

prison fortress around the city on 14July 1789. You know of this event as thestorming of the Bastille. The freeing ofthe handful of prisoners was incidental; itwas the arms that were the goal. The Parisgarrisons had been deeply influencedby revolutionary propaganda followinga massacre of rioters in the working-classquarters of Faubourg Saint-Antoine somemonths earlier. In June, the troops paraded through the streets to shouts of"Long live the Third Estate! We are thesoldiers of the nation!"The king backed down, but the monarchy still had its army and its throne.The bourgeoisie and the aristocracy,mutually hostile classes, were relyingon essentially incompatible governmentinstitutions, the National Assembly andthe royal throne. One or the other wouldhave to go. Either the king (and hismany royal cousins and relations by marriage ruling other countries of Europe)would crush the National Assembly orthe king would meet up with what cameto be known as "Madame la Guillotine."The weeks following the July 14 eventswere known as the "Great Fear," the fearthat the aristocrats were coming to takethe land back and were organizing brigands and robbers and bands of piratesand so- forth. So the peasants armedto protect themselves. Then it turned outto be a rumor, but there they were, armedand ready, and being practical sorts,they turned on the landlords' manorhouses and made use of the arms thatthey'd gotten.The people's representatives, who weredeliberating out at Versailles, took note ofthe insurrection and on August 4 passedlaws eliminating feudal privileges, which

This pamphlet re'prints presentationsgiven by SL Central Committee memberJoseph Seymour on the origins ofMarxism in the French Enlightenment andin left Hegelianism. Also included are"150 Years of the Communist Manifesto'and "Marxism and Religion.'In the retrograde climate of post-Sovietreaction, the struggle to reassert thevalidity of the progr:am and purpose ofrevolutionary Marxism is crucial for ourfight for new October Revolutions.

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had been the original issue all summer.The problem was tllat you had to buyyour way out of your feudal duties andpay 25 times your feudal taxes in order tofree yourself from them. Most peasantssimply ignored that and had been seizingthe land all over the country since July14. They also would bum down tpe lord'smanor house, where the records 'and the'deeds were kept. You know, straightforward and practical.Th,e next major event is crucial to ourunderstanding of the women's role. It wasOctober and the people of Paris werestarving again. October is Usually a coldand wet month in Paris. It was indeedraining at 8 a.m. on the morning of 5 October 1789. Thousands of women--eventually some 8,OOO-had already gatheredin front of City Hall. They knew where tofind the arms because it was they who hadhelped store them here after July 14.The king had allowed the symbol oftherevo lution-t he red-white-and-blue cockade (rosette)-to be trampled underfootby some foreign troops brought in toprotect him and his Austrian queen,Marie Antoinette. The women intendedto stop this anti-revolutionary activityand they wanted bread. Huge stores offine white flour waited at Versailles. Theybegan to walk there. They couldn't getanyone to come with them, but later inthe afternoon about 20,000 troops ofthe National Guard-which had beenformed by the bourgeoisie-forced thevery reluctant General Lafayette, whomyou might know as a hero of the American Revolution, to lead them there. Oneof the women was Pauline Leon, a chocolate maker, who was later to lead theSociety of Revolutionary RepublicanWomen. That day she was armed with apike, which was known as the people'sweapon, because it was so easy to make.You could pull something off the top of arailing and attach it to a good hefty stick.It was said that "the pikes of the peopleare the columns of French liberty."This was no protest march-it was asea of muskets and pikes. The womenwere determined not to come back without the king and his family. There werestill plenty of illusions in the king, butthey wanted him under their watchfuleye, in Paris; At one point t h ~ crowdapparently invaded the palace and waswandering through Marie Antoinette'schambers and some things were gettingbroken and stepped on and stomped andso forth. One very respectable womanin a velvet hat and cloak turned aroundand said very haughtily, "Don't do that,we're here to make a point, not to breakthings." And a woman from the artisanclass turned around and said, "My husband was drawn and quartered for stealing a piece of meat." Finally the womendemanded that the royal family get intotheir carriage. Lafayette's troops led theway and the women marched in front carrying on their pikes loaves of fresh, verywhite bread-the kind reserved for theupper classes-and the heads of two ofthe king's bodyguards.The RevolutionaryJacobin D i ~ t a t o r s h i p While pretending to be happy with thesituation, the king was secretly corresponding with the other royal heads ofstate .and nobles began to emigrate enmasse, establishing counterrevolutionarycenters outside the country. In June 1791,the king and queen disguised themselvesand tried to escape, intending to returnwith the backing of the Austrian army.But an observant revolutionary recognized them in the town of Varennes, andthey were brought back to Paris. Thisdestroyed the people's remaining illusions in the monarchy and triggered anupsurge in revolutionary agitation. Butthe bourgeoisie, fearing things could getout of hand, sought to maintain the monarchy and clamp down on the mass turmoil. A month after the kiilg's arrest,a petition to abolish the monarchy wasbeing circulated among the crowd on thebroad expanse of the Champs de Mars.The National Guard fired on the crowdand many were killed. Commanded bythe aristocrat Lafayette, the National16 FEBRUARY 2001

the "maximum") demanded by the sansculottes and destroyed the resistance ofthe feudal order through a reign of revolutionary terror carried out by the Committee of Public Safety.

Musee CarnavaletA women's political society meets during the French Revolution.

A month after the foreign troops weredriven from France in mid-1794, on July27 (9 Thermidor in the revolutionarycalendar), the conservative wing of thebourgeoisie took the reins of power, Thenext day Robespierre followed the Girondins to the guillotine. The Thermidoriansthought they could do without the alliance with the lower classes. That calculation was proved false, and they werethemselves replaced in 1799 in the coupof the 18th Brumaire (November 9) byNapoleon Bonaparte, who subsequentlydeclared himself emperor. But the Jacobin dictatorship had irreversibly consolidated the central achievement of theFrench Revolution, the rooting out of feudal relations in the countryside.

Guard had been organized as a force notonly against the king but also against thethreat that the bourgeoisie had alreadyseen coming from the Parisian workingpeople.The Champs de Mars massacre markeda split within the bourgeois revolutionary forces. The two main factions thatemerged-the Girondins and the Jacobins-represented the same social class,but they were deeply politically divided.The Prussian monarchy and the rest ofroyal Europe were mobilizing militarilyand in April 1792 revolutionary Francewent to war. The Girondins sought a"negotiated solution" with the reactionaryfeudal armies combined with concessionsto the nobility and the clergy. The Jaco-

his troops moved to drive them out ofa strip of land near Valmy in easternFrance. But not a man flinched as theFrench general waved his hat in the air onthe point of his sword, shouting "Longlive the nation!" The sans-culottes firedstraight and repeatedly at the enemy. Witha torrential rainstorm some hours later,the armies fell back. The German writerGoethe was present at Valmy, and as helooked out over the battlefield that nighthe said, "This day and this place open anew era in the history of the world."He could not have been more prescient.On that day, the Assembly gave way tothe Convention, which was elected byuniversal male suffrage and convokedexpressly to give the nation a constitution

Marriage, Divorceand InheritanceAs materialists, we understand, asMarx put it, that "Law can never behigher than the economic structureand the cultural development of societyconditioned by that structure." The risingcapitalist class was firmly committed tothe preservation of private property, asindeed it had to be. It was precisely thiswhich staked out the limits of the revolutionary social changes that could be carried out, although the most radical years

of the French Revolution went veryfar indeed.The family was temporarily undermined in order to serve the needs ofthe revolution against its enemies, thefeudal nobility and Catholic church. Thisis one demonstration of the fact that social institutions which seem to be immutable, to be "natural" and "eternal," are infact nothing more than the codification of social relations dictated by theparticular economic system that is inplace. After the bourgeoisie consolidated its power as the new ruling class, itre-established the constraints of the family. But nothing would ever be the sameagain. The contradictory reality of theFrench Revolution-the breathtakingleap in securing individual rights and thestrict limits imposed on those rights bythe fact that this was a bourgeois and nota socialist revolution-was captured byKarl Marx in The German Ideology:

Mansell Collection10 August 1792 journee: Assault on Tuileries Palace, king's residence,marked overthrow of monarchy.

"The existence of the family is madenecessary by its connection with themode of production, which exists independently of the will of bourgeois society. That it was impossible to do withoutit was demonstrated in the most strikingway during the French Revolution, whenfor a moment the family was as good aslegally abolished."ins were ready to make temporary concessions to the hungry urban masses inorder to thoroughly vanquish feudal reaction. You could say that the Girondinswere the reformist wing and the Jacobinsthe revolutionary wing of the bourgeoisie.In June 1792, thousands of armedmarchers, including numerous womenarmed with sabers, paraded throughthe Assembly in the first of what becameknown as joumees, or days of action.One official observed at the time, "Thethrone was still standing, but the p e o ~ pie were seated on it, took the measureof it." The monarchy was finally overthrown by a second joumee on 10 August 1792, when the masses invaded the'king's residence at the Tuileries Palace inParis and imprisoned the royal family.The war was not going well. Mostof the former officers, aristocrats, hademigrated. A government represenfativeappealed for recruits by invoking' "theheartbreaking thought that, after all theefforts that have already been made, wemight be forced to return to the misery ofour former slavery." While the best of therevolutionaries volunteered for the front,they were untrained and assumed to beundisciplined. Most of the new recruitswere tradespeople, artisans and journeymen, not the sons of the bourgeoisie asbefore.The road to Paris seemed open tothe Prussian royal armies.The king of Prussia expected theFrench troops to scatter in disarray when

which codified the overthrow of the king.Also, as we will see, the most progressivemarriage and divorce laws until the Bolshevik Revolution were passed on exactlythe same day as the victory at Valmy. Fivemonths later, the king was beheaded.In a' third uprising in June 1793,the people of Paris and 80,000 National Guard troops surrounded the Convention and demanded the arrest of theGirondins and a comprehensive programor revolutionary defense of the country. This ushered in the Jacobin revolutionary dictatorship, which irremediablyabolished seigneurial (feudal) rights, instituted the price controls (referred to as

The feminists who want to dismiss thebourgeois revolution as anti-woman endup echoing those who justify suttee( w i d o w - ~ u r n i n g ) in India and the imposition of the chador in Iran and Afghanistanas "cultural differences." Where the bourgeois revolution did not triumph, thestatus of women is qualitatively inferior.It is enough to contrast the condition ofwomen today in West Europe with Afghanistan, groaning under the rule of theIslamic fundamentalist Taliban.I'll give you a very small example ofwhat it meant to have a society in whichcontinued on page 8

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FrenchRevolution...(continued from page 7)a rising, vigorous, productive class-thebourgeoisie-was held in chek by outmoded institutions. France was Catholic country. In 1572, tens of thousandsof French Protestants were killed in theSt. Bartholomew's Day massacre, andmore fled the country. The 1598 Edict ofNantes assured them the free exerciseof their religious beliefs, but this wasrevoked in 1685. Some of the richestmerchants were Protestant, but marriagesperformed by their own pastors werenot officially recognized. At the deathof a spouse, you would have distant Catholic relatives claiming the inheritance,because legally there was no spouseand the children were illegitimate. BothProtestants and Jews accepted divorce. In1769, according to James Traer in hisMarriage and the Family in EighteenthCentury France (1980), a respected author advocated permitting divorce on thegrounds that "the Protestant nations ofnorthern Europe were enjoying both population growth and prosperity while theCatholic states of southern Europe weresuffering from declining population andpoverty." But the conservatives alwaysmanaged to get the law postponed.Under the Old Regime, women had theright to exactly nothing. The monarchy

consistently sought to reinforce, supplement and extend the father's control overthe marriage of his children. Womenfound guilty of adultery were sentencedto public whipping or imprisonment. Women were also put into convents for lifefor adultery. Marriage was indissolublea life sentence. I f you were a man, youcouldn't marry until you were 30 withoutyour parents' permission. I f your familyhad property, your father could get theking to issue a lettre de cachet, somethinglike an unlimited arrest warrant, and youcould be locked up indefinitely. I f youmarried a minor (under the age of 25 forwomen) without permission, the penaltywas death for rape notwithstanding thewoman's consent. By the way, actors andactresses cooldn't marry either, becausetheir profession was viewed by the churchas immoral.The aristocracy was hardly committedto the sanctity of marriage. It was said

Bibliotheque Nationale EstampesEnlightenment philosopher Condorcet,a proponent of women's rights.8

DEFENSEDES DROITS

DES FEMMES.$ a W j , , " ' f U I g _ C ~ . . , _ ~ ..,....

English radicaldemocrat MaryWollstonecraftwith 1792Frenchtranslation

o.n.,. ......., de 1'..bpiI.. LaT Wow..-~ ' . c W c I i I i . I l . I ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '

of her AVindication ofthe Rights JiI p".A. R Z 8.a . . B n I I h " . ~ . n e J l a & e . - F ~ .. .ALTON,of Woman. a - "DnaI', s.u...nc.u.aq.e.

at the court of Louis XIV some decadesbefore the revolution that the aristocracyfrowned on marital fidelity as being inbad taste, and a German visitor noted, "Iknow of not a single case of mutual affection and loyalty." I introduce this to makethe point that marriage for the upperclasses was all about property. Many ofthe sans-culottes did not marry at all. Butin the Paris of the French Revolution,women were still largely dependent onmen' for economic reasons (whether ornot they were legally married).Much debate and several pieces ofdraft legislation on marriage and divorcehad already been considered by the National Assembly before September 1792.All proposed to make marriage a simple

11 , 2 .

tended to legitimize "free unions." Forexample, soldiers' common-law wivescould receive government pensions.Divorce had not been high on the list ofgrievances before the revolution, but asthe pamphlets flowered, so did the notionthat divorce was a necessary right in society. Probably rarely in history had a simple law so delighted the female population. When a certain citizen Bellepaumecame to the town hall intending to opposethe divorce demanded by his wife, hefound that she had organized "a considerable number of citizens of both sexes,but chiefly women" who pursued him inthe corridors, abused him and tore hisclothes. In the first year after the divorcelaw was passed, women initiated over 70

APAfghanistan: Women in Kabul under Soviet military,presence (left). 1989 Soviet troop withdrawal meantregression tofeudalist backwardness under Talibanfundamentalists.Planetacivil affair. However, what stood in theway of this was the Catholic church.Those clergy who. refused to swear anoath of loyalty were threatened withdeportation. But the Pope forbade it, anda lot did refuse. Though some were deistsor free thinkers, the bourgeois deputies inthe Assembly had no intention of suppressing religion; they nearly all agreedthat some kind of religion was necessaryto keep the people pacified. But now theyhad a big problem on their hands asthe village priests became organizers forcounterrevolution.The local pries ts not only carriedout marriage ceremonies, baptisms andfunerals, but also recorded them. I f heserecords were in -the hands of hostileforces, how could you count the population? You wouldn't even know if youhad enough draftees for the army. Whenin June 1792 the Minister of Justice wrotethat the civil war launched by the aristocracy and the church in the Vendeeregion in southwest France had completely disrupted the keeping of records,one delegate rose to propose that the marriage ceremony be abolished with the cry,"Freedom or death!" So in some ways,the progressive marriage and div01;ce lawsenacted in September the same day as thevictory at Valmy were war measures.The age of adulthood was lowered to21 and marriage without parental consent was legalized. This was followed bya June 1793 decree that proclaimed theright of illegitimate children to inheritfrom both their mothers and their fathers.At a stroke, the institution of the familylost one of its main functions as theframework for the transfer of propertyfrom one generation to the next. Whileinheritance rights d i ~ n ' t mean much tothose without property, the new laws also

percent of all divorces. One woman wroteto the Convention:"The female citizen Govot, a free woman,solemnly comes to give homage to thissacred law of divorce. Yesterday, groaning under the control of a despotic husband, liberty was only an empty word forher. Today, returned to the dignity of anindependent woman, she idolizes thisbeneficial law that breaks ill-matchedties and returns hearts to themselves, tonature, and finally to divine liberty. I offermy country six francs for the expense ofwar. I add my marriage ring, which wasuntil today the symbol of my slavery."

The SOCiety of RevolutionaryRepublican WomenThe question of women's status insociety had been a subject of debatethroughout the Enlightenment. The Ency-, clopedia, published just before the revolution and intended as a compendium

of all knowledge, contained four contributions under the category "Women":one in favor of equality, one ambiguousand two against. Even in a very radicalwork like Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),woman's role as subordinate to maninside the family was not seriously calledinto question. Wollstonecraft was part ofa circle of British radical-democratic revolutionaries who supported the FrenchRevolution against English monarchicalreaction, even participating in the Frenchgovernment.Most of the Enlightenment thinkersand writers concentrated on educationfor women, and that was about it. Now, 'this is undeniably a very important question, and it refuted the prevalent ideathat women were inferior to men andtheir brains worked in an inferior way.Only about a third of French women atthe time were literate. You'd find them

during the revolutionary years at the corner cafe with their glass of red wine,reading or listening to someone else readRobespierre's latest speech. The hungerfor knowledge was totally linked to thedesire to change society. Before 1777,France had no daily newspaper. Twoyears later, there were 35 papers andperiodicals and by 1789 there were 169.Thousands of political pamphlets rolledoff the printing presses. .One of the novels based on the newresearch published in the last few. yearshas the Enlightenment philosopher Condorcet, who wrote very eloquently aboutwomen's rights, and his lovely youngwife enjoying long mornings reading a bitofVoltaire or the equivalent of the SundayNew York Times in bed with their cafe aulait, making love, and then getting up inthe afternoon to walk in the garden anddo their very serious intellectual work.Not a bad life, right? But it wasn't available to most people, of course. Condorcetended by opposing the execution of LouisXVI, ostensibly on the grounds of opposition to the death penalty.The working women of Paris who werea motor force in the revoiution lived verydifferent lives. Perhaps 45,000 women inParis, some 20 percent, were wage earners; a similar percentage of women in cihies like Lyon and Rouen worked. Becauseof the war, women were able to break intotraditionally male professions and theywere also employed at sewing, as domestic servants. Some were proprietors ofshops. Wives, legal or otherwise, of soldiers at the front were given subsidies.The Paris municipal government and thepolitical clubs set up spinning workshopsthat at a certain point employed severalthousand women, though the wages weremiserable. They were centralized by thegovernment office responsible for producing clothes for the troops.

It was from among these women of thesans-culottes that the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was formedin the spring of 1793. One of the leadersof the society was the chocolate makerPauline Leon, whom we last saw withher pike on the October 1789 march toVersailles. Another was the actress ClaireLacombe, who always followed hersignature with "A Free Woman." A thirdwas Anne Felicite Colombe, who owneda print shop. Typography was generallya man's job, so she was already exceptional for this. In '1791, she had beenone of the four women arrested whenthe National Guard shot down demonstrators at the Champs de Mars calling forthe overthrow of the monarchy. Colombeprinted the revolutionary newspapersof Jean-Paul Marat, L'Ami du PeujJle(The Friend of the People) and L'Orateurdu Peuple (The Orator of the People).She was dragged into a libel suit, whichshe eventually won, and distributed the20,000-livre settlement to the poor in herneighb(')rhood.While women did not win the rightto vote for delegates to the Convention,especially after the establishment of theJacobin dictatorship in 1793 they playeda full role in the Parisian sectional assemblies, intervening, presenting positions,voting and being elected as delegates. They refused to be "servile women,domestic animals," as one put it in May1793. Interestingly, the one widespreaddemand for formal equality was for theright to bear arms. In March 1792, PaulineLeon had led a delegation to present apetition to the Assembly declaring:

- "You cannot refuse us and society cannotremove from us this right which naturegives us, unless it is alleged that theDeclaration of Rights is not applicable towomen and that they must allow theirthroats to be slit, like sheep, without having the right to defend themselves."The women demanded the right to armthemselves with pikes, pistols, sabersand rifles, and to assemble for maneuverson the Champs de Mars. After muchdebate, the Assembly moved to put thepetition in the minutes with honorablemention. Dozens of women actuallywent to the front when the war began, afew as officers.The Society of Revolutionary Republi-

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can Women solidly backed the Jacobins as the revolutionary governmentand politically supported the extreme leftEnrages around Jacques Roux, who spokefor the popular masses. Just after theRevolutionary Republican Women wasfounded, they mobilized the support ofthe masses in the streets for the":Jacobins,whose battle to oust the Girondins wasthen coming to a head. As the split deepened, there were many more women thanmen in the street gatherings, according topolice reports. The Revolutionary Republican Women dressed in military clothesand carried sabers. One account has themwaging a military battle in the Convention to get back the seats which had beentaken from them by supporters of theright-wing Gironde.Reversal of GainsUnder Thermidor

In October 1793, the society becameone of the first organizations to be bannedby the Jacobin government. Those feminist historians I mentioned earlier claimthat this proves that the French Revolution was essentially hostile to women.That's wrong. The society was bannednot because it was composed of women,but because it was one of the most radicalexpressions of the sans-culottes.Here's what happened. The Enragesand the Revolutionary Republican Women fought for strict price controls, especially on food, and an upper limit on thesize of personal fortunes. In October,the Revolutionary Republican Womenlaunched a campaign to force all womento wear the revolutionary cockade. Theybrought their campaign to Les HaIles, thecentral marketplace in Paris. The marketwomen were of course hostile to the pricemaximum on food that had just beenimposed by the Jacobin government asa concession to the sans-culottes. Thequestion of the cockade was just thepretext for the major-league brawl thatensued between the market women andthe women revolutionaries. This fight

represented an early split in the Jacobins'base, and the Jacobins sided with the market women, banning the RevolutionaryRepublicans.The peasants wanted maximum foodprices, the artisan-proletariat in the cities wanted minimum ones, pointing tothe spectre of a civil war which the sanscullotes could not win. The Jacobinscould have tried to strike a deal, but ultimately they could not satisfy the conflicting demands of the urban poor and thepeasantry. When revolutionary Russia inthe early 1920s was confronted with the"scissors crisis," as the price of scarcemanufactured goods rose and the priceof agricultural products fell and the peasants threatened to withhold their produce,Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky proposeda course Of planned industrializationto make more manufactured goods available to the peasants and maintain theirsupport for the proletarian dictatorship.

Women fightersin 1871 ParisCommune, the firstrealization of thedictatorship of theproletariat.

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PrQgress Publishers1919 Soviet monument to Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat. 1917 postcard withRussian translation of French Revolution slogan: "Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!"Trotsky'S proposal was rejected at thetime (only to be implemented at forcedmarch pace a few years later by Stalin).But such an option was objectively unrealizable in the capitalist economic systemof pre-industrial France.By the fall of 1793, the Jacobins andrevolutionary France were gasping for air.Mandatory conscription had provokedmass uprisings in the Vendee; there hadbeen treachery at the front; the armiesof the European monarchies had reinvaded France; and Girondin provinceswere seceding; Marat, the "friend ofthe people," had been assassinated by the

Women played a vanguard role in the lastuprising of the French Revolution in thespring of 1795, after Therrnidor. The rallying cry was "Bread a n ~ the Constitutionof 1793!" .The modem feminist historians believethat the role of . women who rose upfrom the "cellars and catacombs" hasbeen largely obscured because of prevailing patriarchal attitudes in society. Orthey seek to show that women acted onlyon "women's issues," mainly food shortages. While there's some truth in boththese observations, they fundamentallymiss the point. The mass of active women

VIue IB r RIIlIivBrsaIre dB II bJoln1lon I'IISSBThe WomanWorker, newspaper publishedby the FrenchCommunist Partyin the early 1920s.

royalist Charlotte Corday. Against thisbackdrop, the Revolutionary Republican Women, in their revolutionary zealagainst the market women, threatened toget in the way of prompt and regulardeliveriesof food to the city from thecountryside, without which the Jacobinswould have lost the allegiance of theurban masses.Many of the revolutionary women continued to be active as individuals. Evenafter being arrested by the Jacobin government, Claire Lacombe stayed loyalto Robespierre. She never renounced hersUpp'ort, and after Robespierre's execution she always refused to point out thatshe had been arrested by his revolutionarygovernment because she hated the idea ofbecoming a hero of the Therrnidorians.

in the French Revolution did not fight andorganize as women but as revolutionaries.And, as the October 1789 march thatbrought the king back from Versaillesshowed, it wasn't simply the question ofbread that motivated them.Therrnidor marked the end of the radi.cal phase of the revolution, and womenwere among the first to feel this. Thiswas especially true for divorced women,who would have trouble finding work andmaintaining themselves under the conservative Therrnidorians. Divorce becameidentified with the "ruin of society" andthe "torrent of corruption that invadedthe cities and especially Paris" during theTerror and the months that followed it.Proof of a legitimate marriage became .a requfrement for soldiers' wives seeking to receive aid. After May 1795, theConvention banned women from "attending political assemblies," urging them towithdraw to their homes and ordering':the arrest of those who would gathertogether in groups of more than five."The Napoleonic Code saw a furtherreversal of the gains of women. It's reported that the only part of the deliberations on the Napoleonic Code that Bonaparte sat in on was the Family Codeenacted in 1804. The Family Code againmade women minors from the standpointof the law, mandating that they had tohave the ~ p p r o v a l of their husbandsfor all contracts and so forth. In 1816,a year after Napoleon was overthrownand the monarchy restored, divorce wasabolished.For Women's LiberationThrough Socialist Revolution!

I want to briefly trace the revolutionary continuity extending from theFrench Revolution through the 19th century. The French Revolution, refractedthrough Napoleon's armies, brought thefirst notions of women's equality to hideously backward tsarist Russia; Following

Napoleon's defeat, Paris was occupied byRussian troops for a period of time. Anumber of young officers spent a lot oftime in the cafes talking to people aboutwhat had been going on, and went back toSt. Petersburg and led the DecembristUprising against the tsarist autocracy in1825. They fought, among other things,for women's equality.The very first communist ideas cameout of the analysis developed by someof the radical Jacobins while in prisonafter the defeat of the Jacobin dictatorship. Revolutionaries like GracchusBabeuf, who organized the Conspiracy ofEquals, and Philippe Buonarroti came tobelieve that private property itsel f was thecause of oppression. They provided a living link to Marx and Engels, who issuedthe Communist Manifesto as the next revolutionary wave swept Europe in 1848,declaring: "The bourgeois family willvanish as a matter of course when itscomplement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital." InFrance, a program was advanced forwomen's emancipation that called forreplacing domestic slavery with sociallyorganized and financed services. I foundthis 1848 program reprinted in an early1920s women's journal published bythe French Communist Party, L'Ouvriere(The Woman Worker).In the Paris Commune in 1871, womenonce again played an extremely importantrole. Marx described the Commune as thefirst realization of the dictatorship of theproletariat, though it lasted less than threemonths. The women of the Paris Commune were called the "incendiaries" bythe reactionary press, and a correspondent for the London Times wrote, "I fthe French Nation were composed ofnothing but women, what a terrible nationit would be." But Marx hailed them: "Thewomen of Paris joyfully give up theirlives on the barricades and executiongrounds" (quoted in Edith Thomas, TheWomen Incendiaries [1967]). When theFrench capitalist rulers finally defeatedthe Commune after heroic resistance,they slaughtered at least 30,000 people inone week, and many thousands morewere sent to penal colonies.Today, bourgeois France is an imperialist power, where the July 14 stormingof the Bastille is celebrated as a chauvinist glorification of the "grandeur ofFrance"-much like July 4 here-whileFrench colonial atrocities are carried outto the music of the once-revolutionaryhymn, the Marseillaise.We Trotskyists know that it will takeworld socialist revolution to do away with. the institutions which are the root causeof women's oppression. In our fight toreforge Leon Trotsky's Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution,to lead new October Revolutions aroundthe planet, we are guided by the words ofthe Fourth International's founding document, the 1938 Transitional Program:"The sections of the Fourth Internationalshould seek bases of support amongthe most exploited layers of the workingclass, consequently among the womenworkers. Here they will find inexhaustible stores of devotion, selflessness, andreadiness to sacrifice." Join us!.

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California ...(continued from page 1)but on constantly expanding productionof the things people need.The Capitalist Myth of ...the Free Market

private ownership of industry increasingly comes into conflict with the centralized, collective process of productionwhich the capitalists themselves broughtinto being. Thus, to further social andeconomic progress it is necessary forthe capitalists' rule over society tobe smashed by the collective producers,the working class, through a workersrevolution.The Populist Myth ofthe "Public Interest"

That truth is precisely what the reformist left, clinging to the hope of influencing the capitalist state, is devotedto obscuring from the working class. InSocialist Worker (19 January), the International Socialist Organization (ISO)

society, these sewer socialists seem tothink that all it takes is a stiff municipalordinance to make the capitalist bosses situp and take notice and command thoseelectrons to flow.Contrary to the liberal consumer activ'ists and fake lefts, neither regulation norpublic ownership of utilities ever hadanything to do with the interests ofthe population, but rather served theinterests of the capitalists as a whole.Electric power is the .heart and blood ofthe interdependent industrial infrastructure. In the early years of the 20th century, it became clear how unviable it wasfor many companies to run competingelectrical networks. But early attemptsby city and state governments to regulateutilities were quickly bypassed by giant

Deregulation of the privately ownedmonopolies that ran gas and electric production and distribution for half a centuryon the basis of government-guaranteedprofits was launched nationally in 1992by the U.S. Energy Policy Act. In California, it was promoted as. a step towardcleaner, more efficient and cheaper powerfor all. According to the deregulationevangelists, once the dead hand of thegiant utilities was lifted-by "unbundling" their generating, transmission andretailing operations-investors wouldflock to build new, efficient power plantsand compete to provide power at the lowest price in a new marketplace called theCalifornia Power Exchange. But, as a 5February article on the Fortune Web siteput it, "Instead of offering the output oftheir plants to the Power Exchange at alittle more than the cost of generating it,they offered to sell power only at skyhigh prices, or not at all. In other words,instead of thinking like a regulated utility, the private power generators werethinking like-=-surprise!-sellers lookingfor the best price."

0 r - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ~ _ ,

This organ of finance capital understands that the aim of capitalists is tomaximize profits, not efficiency. Theworkers who collectively create thewealth of society are paid far less than thevalue their labor creates. That difference,after overhead expenses and upkeep onmachinery is subtracted, is what the capitalists pocket as the return on theirinvestments. Under capitalism, investment cannot be planned for the good ofsociety as a whole because ownership ofcapital is divided up among many capitalists, each of whom tries to maximize thereturn on his investment relative to all theothers, naturally investing where thatreturn is highest. Such transfer of capitaldoes not abate until increased productionand competition drive down the rate ofprofit to the point where it is no longeradequate. At that point, capital flees,many firms go belly up and factories areshut down.The result is the anarchic veeringbetween boom and bust which is the hallmark of a capitalist economy. Those capitalists who have more financial resourcesgobble up their smaller competitors, giving rise to the domination of productionby a handful of big operations that havethe clout to manipulate the market, alternately colluding with each other andtrying to cut each other's throat. Thismonopoly capitalism further retardsdevelopment of the productive forces, as

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Berkeley...(continued from page 3)"anti-prison labor" movement, in positing that the increase in incarceration isdue to corporations' lust for cheap labor,is a liberal facade to reform capitalism.Prisons are an integral

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Workers Vanguard No 752 - 16 February 2001