Non-political Voice

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Women's Voice is the women's magazine of the Socialist Workers Party • Other offsprings of the SWP include the Right to Work Campaign, Rank and file, Hospital Worker and, of course, the Anti-Nazi League.

All these organisations pursue the masses with an array of glossy publications, similar badges, posters and handouts.

In terms of propaganda these are all produced with a level of graphic design any adman would envy-snappy slogans, simple to understand, bright colours, lively photos.

Woman Worker would not criticise the publications of the SWP for using good design to convey their politics. This we would recognise as a strength-but not when it appears to be the top priority, above. the political content.

Women's Voice attempts to appear left of Spare Rib and with an orientation towards the working class by usually putting strong working class women on the front cover.

The whole aim of Women's Voice, like that of the SWP, is to attract around them counts, and in order to get it you must have a good sell. But what is Women's Voice selling?

What are the politics the SWP Women's Voice?

The current issue says:

"Women's Voice is an organisation that fight for women's liberation and socialism. We fight for equal pay, free abortion and contraception, maternity leave and childcare provisión, the right to work, against any form of discrimination on grounds of sex, sexual orientation or race"

This is its official position after a conference clarifying its political links with the SWP Over the past years the magazine has become a hotchpotch of various feminist articles with a vaguely socialist flavour.

Women's Voice June 1978 wrote:

"Women who never dreamed they could put pen to paper have written to us about their everyday lives, their marriages, their housing problems, their children's education, their orgasms, their rights to maternity leave or lack of it."

This report makes seeing a difference with Marjorie Proops, let alone Spare Rib difficult.

The predominant political line of the SWP is whatever the basis, whatever the differences we must get together and fight. "Unity is strength", 'the workers united will never be defeated"

But they are united -the strongest example of rank and file action in the past few years must be the mass picke ts at Grunwicks.

Unionisation Thousands gathered to fight Ir that struggle for unionisation but mass sol darity was clearly shown to be not enough.

It is a question of who leads the working class. That struggle like hundreds of others was betrayed and sold out by the trade union leaders.

It could have been won in days had the leadership of the TUC instructed its members to cut off water and electricity to the firm."

The fourteen month-long Garners strike could have been won if the Transport and General Workers Union (which has ½ million members in London alone) had organised strike action and effective blacking. They didn't and it was lost.

Similarly with the firemen's strike, It was the refusal of the TUC to support that strike which led to its failure-not the lack of popular backing or Women's Voice street meetings.

The leadership of the trade unions control 12½million and can mobilise enormous numbers for demonstrations, for MORE DETAILS Please send me more details Workers Socialist League, Name.

Address Send to WSL, 31 mouth Park London, NWS 1HR example the 1976 cuts demonstration of 80,000, but did those numbers save a single nursery place?

• The SWP locate the failure to overthrow capitalişm not in the corrupt reformist leadership of the working class but in the working class itself. bureaucracies and take no notice ontovine They insist that you can bypass the Programme and policies for removing capitalism are unnecessary as long as mass of people get together and fight.

The SWP argue that a scientific Marxist analysis of, for example, the crisis of capitaIsm will allenate and put people off. They preter to present instead pictures of fat greedy bosses.

Militancy is not enough, nor is being told how rotten the system is: As Trotsky stresses in the Transitional Programme, it is crucially question of leadership, not of numbers, of programme and not just readiness to fight.

Of course, we must find the road to the masses, but never on just the lowest common denominator.

Many thousands of working class women are coming forward in the fight against the Tory attacks but they want and need method of removing the system that oppresses them beyond the flashy protest propaganda and the cry for socialism that Women's Voice offers them.

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