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SIX OFWOMENMINERS June 22-24, 1984 Charleston House Charleston, West Virginia Sponsored by Goal Employment Projece Coal Mining Women's Support Team Coal Employment Project Post Office Box 3403 Oak Ridge, Tennessee 37830 615 482 3428 Socialist Action was founded at a national conference in October 1983. In February our first National Committee meeting launched a $16,000 fund drive to finance our growing activities, especially our burgeoning publishing efforts. These include the improvement of our monthly newspaper, the regular publication of the Socialist Action Information Bulletin, and the expansion of our national organization.

We have just published No. 4 of our Socialist Action Information Bulletin. (See review in this issue.) In forthcoming issues of this bulletin, we will be printing a series of articles work but from the substitution of new, cheaper types of work for the older, more unionized ones. So long as women are not paid for comparable work, men will lose jobs, not by women replacing them at the old worksites, but by the opening of new worksites and job categories that can be staffed by the cheaper labor of women and youth. Men's only protection is to support not just equal pay for equal work but comparable pay for comparable work, so that employers have no incentive to replace old jobs by new ones. To do that, however, requires a challenge to the basic operation of the capitalist labor market.

To those who see women's quest for autonomy as a threat to male power and children's self-development, we need to explain the real history of female oppression, which was integrally related to the drive of state societies to increase list fund drive by Les Evans and Ernest Mandel in response to Doug Jenness and Jack Barnes, leaders of the Socialist Workers Party. These articles answer the open and public attack by the SWP leadership on Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and on the program and heritage of the SWP and of the Fourth International.

In addition to our newspaper and information bulletins, we expect to begin publication of a theoretical magazine later this year. Please help to ensure that our expansion campaign continues to be a success. Send your contributions and subscriptions to Socialist Action, 3435 Army St., No. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110. what it would cost to buy the cleaning and childcare service on the market, almost invariably exceeds the amount of her husband's wages by a considerable sum.

The existence of sexism, in other words, fools men into accepting a wage that is lower than the actual cost of reproducing their labor power. It is capitalism, not feminism, that strives to bring men down to the level of women and children. Our intent is to raise the position of everyone, challenging private oppression within the family and public oppression in the labor market.

We need to be very clear with the American people that this country hasn't tried feminism yet. The only way to give it a fair shot is to change the social and economic imperatives that make women a source of cheap labor and force the individual family to absorb the buffetings of the capitalist economic cycle.

Women are not trying to take away what Blacks, the elderly, or the white male workers have. They haven't got enough to make it worth our while. According to U.S. government statistics, the bottom 60 percent of families in America have to share, among them, only about 10 percent of the nation's wealth. That's hardly enough to fight over. If we have to compete with anyone, we plan to go where the real money is—to, say, the two percent of the population who have at their disposal an amount of wealth larger than an entire year's gross national product. Or to the biggest single piece of the U.S. budgetthe military.

We know there are people and "rock the boat" by organizing demonstrations. The promises were promptly broken and the ERA was defeated.

The greatest gain of the women's movement in recent years was the extension of the ERA deadline, which was won only when 100,000 people demonstrated in the streets of Washington, D.C. Yet that gain was frittered away by a return to the policy of individual lobbying and campaigning for professional politicians—a policy that dilutes our power by involving us in individual bargaining and endless see-sawing back and forth between "lesser evils"' Our task now is not to dilute our demands but to be dead honest about what we can and cannot offer the American people. We promise no quick fixes—no magic candidate who's going to miraculously grant our needs. We will have to win every victory by struggle and can count no gain safe until we succeed in overturning the whole private profit system that keeps us doubly exploited, in the workplace and the family. So we need to be quite clear that feminism is not just "good old traditional American politics" —just business as usual except that half the businessmen are women. Feminism requires us to link up with our allies who are also under attack by capitalism, from the ghettos and factories of America to the trenches of Nicaragua. Feminism is as American as the Fourth of July, I'll grant you that; but let's remember what the annual picnic speeches tend to gloss over: The Fourth of July was the day the colonists declared their revolutionary independence from the old monarchical system. The question of home rule was settled then. The struggle now is over who should rule at home.

June 1984

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