What kind of movement?

In recent years, Pakistani women and gender minorities have organised marches across the country on the International Working Women’s Day.

Despite attacks from the patriarchal Right and Left, their resolve to organise has not wavered. Different approaches to organising have surfaced within the larger movement. This article is in response to the idea prevalent amongst certain well-intentioned layers that our movement should be a cross-class one.

The ecological movements in Europe are plagued by a key weakness: a crisis of working-class leadership in the wake of a cross-class movement. The existing petty-bourgeois leadership with its radical programme criticises the rulers but makes appeals to the same for fixing the system. In the final sense, this means pushing for a “green” capitalism, which is neither “social” nor “peaceful” for the vast exploited and oppressed majority of the world. Now, having an anti-capitalist programme – a programme that leads beyond capitalism – is possible for someone who is critical of symptoms of capitalism or even the system as a whole.

The majority of the existing Pakistani women’s movement is often not even subjectively anti-capitalist. But even the layers that are do not have an anti-capitalist programme. While last year’s Aurat March manifesto pins the blame for certain problems on capitalism, it does not call for another system, let alone telling us how to achieve it. It also falls short of pinpointing the fundamental roots of women’s oppression, which can be found in the specific division of labour within capitalist society and the burden of privatised reproductive work – cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc – put on the shoulders of (largely working- and lower middle-class) women within the family.

Just like the global climate movement, the women’s movement in Pakistan has to become conscious of the system it is fighting. Adding specific anti-capitalist criticisms to our programme is not enough. We have to go beyond and hand over the reins of leadership to the working class.

A cross-class movement claims to represent the interests of all classes. Such a movement cannot have a working-class programme.

Different classes have different objective interests. The working class has no ownership over the means of production. Whether or not this class is subjectively conscious of it as yet, its objective interest lies in the abolition of private ownership of the means of production and replacing it with social ownership. This interest is irreconcilable with that of those classes whose source of wealth and social status is private ownership of property.

This is not about the personal individual participation of women from this or that class. It is a question of which class it is whose programme a movement embodies. Will a cross-class movement also have a ‘cross-class programme’? This is either impractical as it will limit everyone to the smallest common denominator or, in the final sense, impossible as there will always be a class that determines the politics/programme of the movement.

In a cross-class movement in a bourgeois society, this necessarily means subordinating the working women’s class interest (which is linked to the strategic removal of the oppressive division of labour with regard to productive and reproductive work) to the limited goals of bourgeois feminists.

Let us assume the best possible outcome of a cross-class movement: that limited demands for formal equality between men and women are fulfilled. Working women will get formal equality like their bourgeois feminist counterparts but they will have it as women who will still work 12 hours a day and have no access to healthcare or welfare. They will have formal access to all spheres of public life as much as their male working-class partners, who equally have no money or time to factually enter these spheres. These working women will fight for the individual rights and freedoms of bourgeois feminists in the name of a cross-class movement.

But this cross-class movement will not and cannot fight for the full emancipation of the working woman as long as the movement represents the interests of all classes, which are irreconcilable with the interests of the working majority. While there can be tactical agreements for campaigns with bourgeois feminists (eg, against the Hudood Ordinances), the working woman needs her own organisations, meetings, campaigns and programme – simply her own movement – for liberation, which is independent of the limitations that her bourgeois and petty-bourgeois feminist allies would like to impose on her in simply a ‘cross-class movement’.

Many radicals and liberals, usually from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, tend to see this as a question of individuals from different classes joining a movement to fight together for individual rights as citizens. Socialists see this as a question of social relations with a material basis that forms the foundation of women’s oppression. They fight against reactionary laws as well as for a change in the ‘consciousness’ of individuals. But they do so while recognising that these are finally expressions of that very foundation. Gender-based oppression is not simply a question of wrong consciousness on an individual level. It is a question of the wrong conditions of our society.

In contemporary class society, revolutionary Marxism locates the origins of gender-based oppression in the public-private divide, wherein the man goes out to work in the public ‘productive’ sphere while the woman is responsible for ‘reproductive’ work. This keeps particularly working-class women responsible for privatised household management, depriving them of interaction with other women of their class. In this way, a major chunk of the working class – working women – is deprived of organising itself.

Regarding this, the Women Democratic Front has a revolutionary demand: the socialisation of household work – which is: bringing it into the social sphere of life. It does not want to maintain this gender-based division of labour, and recognises that there can be no end to gender-based oppression within capitalism and that the working class is the only force that can change this.

The middle classes will always spontaneously oscillate between the ruling class and the working class. Particularly in a country where there is no organised working class force, they will in the final programmatic sense – but also in the way how radical activists from middle-class backgrounds behave – be inclined towards, at best, a radical, democratic bourgeois programme. It is not excluded that one wins sections of the middle classes for a working-class programme and for the revolution. But they have to be won. And they can only be won if the working class becomes a factor and a force, on its own. One has to think it in dimensions of big numbers, not in terms of a few radicals who meet to think and occasionally organise a protest together.

Right now, socialists cannot and should not start telling people: “No, you are not working class, you cannot join us.” It is important that this be made clear. They should aim to win every radical but every radical who agrees to break with their own class privilege and agrees to a programme of building a socialist working women’s movement, not just in words but in deeds.

In short, this means that socialists do not deny individuals from classes other than the working class to join and fight against patriarchy and capitalism. But they do so without making programmatic concessions in terms of which class it is whose interests we will defend. The reason for this is simple. The defence of the interests of any class other than the working class means, in the final sense, the defence of patriarchy and capitalism.

We, as women and gender and sexual minorities who together organise women’s marches across Pakistan, are confronted with a choice. Either, we adopt a defensive approach and refuse to engage with any criticism about our movement’s class character. Or we engage critically and reflect internally to better our campaigns, struggles and movements and let a working-class programme lead the way to victory in our goal of smashing patriarchy and capitalism.

The writer is a member of the Women Democratic Front.

Twitter: @minerwatahir