Pamphlets on Women's Liberation A FIGHT Women Today
1989Roland Sheppard 1989-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 13 →
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is almost always in the framework of racist population-control programs imposed by imperialism. [See accompanying article in this issue.] Women are used as unwitting guinea pigs for testing birth-control devices and drugs. Even after the dalcon shield IUD was recognized as harmful to women's health, it continued to be shipped to these countries. Millions of women are forced to seek illegal abortions under the most unsanitary and degrading conditions. In some Third World countries, women are jailed for having abortions performed Such basic democratic demands as giving women rights as individuals independent of their husbands' control will have great weight in the struggle for liberation in the colonial and semicolonial countries. At the same time, they will immediately be combined with such social and economic issues as rising prices, SOCIALIST ACTION ally of the working class in the fight to overthrow capitalism.
Women's liberation cannot be won in a capitalist society. Women's oppression is too fundamental a part of class rule to be given up lightly, no matter how many women are elected to office. It poses too basic a question to the state.
We support the fight for every right that can be wrested from the powers that be, but we know that the only way any right can be fully secured is through the replacement of capitalism with socialism-that is, a society based on human needs, not profits.
Eliminating the material basis for women's oppression will establish the conditions necessary to achieve women's liberation. To paraphrase Marx, then real human history will begin, when human beings have a conscious say about what shape and direction their society will take.
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Barry Sheppard, a former central leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), has launched a political critique of the party's top leadership. His criticism is contained in a July 9, 1989, letter to the SWP's Political Committee he is circulating among members of that party.
Sheppard resigned from the SWP in June 1988 because he had "become demoralized by certain actions the party leadership" had taken against him.
He had been, along with current SWP Vo SOCIALIST