reflect a decisive shift in direction for the organisation. In our view, the comthe and towards solutions.
have provided the basis for these errors.
their conference report in Socialist Worker (14 Nov) the SWP states: 'The SWP itself has been affected by the lack of industrial struggle ana by sectionalism... As a result, SWP Lilt Cone cuce decided shift our intervention around industrial disputes by every member the key to activiCampaign is central to that Thẹ Right Work shift. Shift The clearest example of what this shift will mean the proposal Women's Voice. The conference agreed to disband the Women's AT its recent conference, the Socialist turning away broad political questions crude economistic The SWP's pessimistic view of the groups although the magazine Women's Voice will remain.
JUDITH ARKWRIGHT argues that the SWP are in danger of their DOCKS OR the struggle for vomen's liberation when women's voic was set up in 1979, there was a growing movement OI women who were prepared to take action to change their situation.
We disagreed . strongly with the SWP at Le une for setting up Women's women's movement in the style German movements of the 1890s.
We pointed out that women were coming politics from all sorts of different directions. It was a sectarian approach to expect women campaigning around abortion, the right to work, battered wives, nurseries and so on, to join Women's on the basis of solidarity with a full socialist programme. Polemic In our view, the con 'ades of the SWP had no understood relationship Lital revoltona organisations should have to broad social movements and united front campaigns. They persisted in seeing such structures merely channels of recruitment to the SWP, and counterposed their organisations and structures.
The decision to dismantle Women's Voice as an organisation, rather than correcting this tarian error, has merely compounded ‹C0mpanied as it is by a strong polemic against any kind of autonomous women's movement.
In his article in International Socialist Journal (ISJ Series 22 No.13) Tony Cliff maintains that the whole History the women's movement in Britain and abroad, from the time of the suffragettes has been one in which only the of bourgeois socialists.
Socialist Challenge starts from a rather different assessment, which is shared with the Fourth international and its sympathisers who have been involved in the construction of the autonomous women's movements in various dit. ferent countries around Everywhere in the last decade, women have been themselves to fight for their interests More and more, women's interests have been taken up inside the labour movement and among class WUllicil. there is a mass women's movement supporting the revolution; Iran, the women's played a key role in drawing women into the struggle against the Shah; in Europe, , the campaigns led by the women's movements for abortion rights have brought down governments and have involved many working class women and outside the organised labour movement. Fetish Thus the autonomous women's movement is not a fetish or an abstract principle, it is a living movement all over the world which Pucting they sieces fatether
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Workers Party took a number of deci- sions about its future strategy which
rades of the SWP are
which confront the working class to- day
class struggle and their ostrich like at- titude to the crisis in the Labour Party,