No Woman, No Revolution, Part 3a
3CCI gets it wrong
The Third Congress of the
Communist International (3CCI), 22 June to 12 July 1921, seems to have had a
peculiar flavour to it, if the documents on women from that congress (linked
below) are anything to go by.
Whereas the 2CCI of the
previous year had shown its awareness of the necessity of democratisation, so
as to create a collective “Subject of History” out of the unorganised masses,
in 1921 the situation was practically the reverse, at least as far as the women
were concerned.
“The III
Congress of the Communist International is firmly opposed to any kind of
separate women’s associations in the Parties and trade unions, or special
women’s organisations.”
Instead, women’s
“departments” were to be formed within the communist parties to carry out
various prescribed tasks in relation to women, which appeared to consist mainly
of telling the women what to do.
It starts with “educating the broad mass of working women
in Communist ideas”. This sounds like indoctrination (or “inculcation”)
more than education.
In these theses on work among
women, there is a lot that is more general, for example: “The working class must adhere firmly and without hesitation to the
tactics outlined by the III International.”
These comrades had become
bold on the back of the October Revolution of 1917. They felt entitled, or even
duty-bound, to take charge and to send out categorical and detailed orders to
the women of the world that must be obeyed strictly and without hesitation.
“It is in the
interests of the working class that women are drawn in to the organised ranks
of the proletariat as it fights for Communism.”
These comrades had no sense
of anything else than “fight”, followed by communism. They had no sense of contradiction
between their own prescriptive, dictatorial, unashamedly “top-down” hierarchy
of power, and the withering away of the state envisaged by Lenin in The State
and Revolution just four years earlier, meaning un-coerced self-management of
and by the masses.
The democratic formation of
the collective mass Subject of History was not a problem to the delegates of
the 3CCI. They would supply the necessary will-power. If that meant the resurrection
of the State, then so be it, they thought.
Thus it came to pass that the
3CCI decreed:
“…that a special
apparatus for conducting work among women is necessary. This apparatus must
consist of departments or commissions for work among women, attached to every
Party committee at all levels, from the CC of the Party right down to the
urban, district or local Party committee. This decision is binding on all
Parties in the Communist International.”
The document is extremely
detailed about what these “departments” are supposed to do.
What we have here is a mirror
image of the feared bourgeois-feminist domination of the working women, which
is the reason why generalised women’s organisations were not approved of and
were effectively banned for communists by the 3CCI.
According to all this, the
women will be bossed, one way or another: either by the bourgeois feminists, or
by the 3CCI’s “departments”. Nothing in these 3CCI documents speaks of
free-willing democratic mass organisation of and for women.
It is clear from these texts why
and how the women could be left out of the National Democratic Revolutions. A
separate study might reveal that the democratic vitality of the soviets as
organs of popular power was already waning in the Soviet Union in 1921, and
that the independence of trade unions was already under attack (but still being
defended by Lenin). The New Economic Policy was coming into being.
Contradictory movements were
in action at one and the same time, just as they are today. In South Africa,
there are no independent democratic organisations of women, but there are
departments; and this applies almost everywhere in Africa.
[Picture: woman canning worker
in the USA]
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Women,
Principles, Declaration, Resolution, 3CCI, 1921.
