- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2109
The Queensland branches of the Communist Party of Australia conducted a successful and fruitful National Education Class this June in Nambour. Besides analysing the Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s writings, we also examined the writings of Angela Davis, especially her well-known Women, Race and Class. After a lively debate we concluded that the text is very useful for other schools.
Today Angela Davis is known as a revolutionary civil rights activist and author of scholarly writings on Black US history. Her connections with the Black Panthers and the Communist Party of the USA were used against her during her trial where she was accused of murder, kidnapping, and criminal conspiracy. California governor Ronald Reagan pushed for her conviction.
The 16 months Davis spent in jail gave her an understanding of the racist prison-industrial-complex which solidified her socialist beliefs and commitment to Black liberation. She wrote that the US prison system had to be dismantled, as the majority of people in prisons are there, not because they are vicious felons, but because the poor are unable to pay fines, pay bail, or are in possession of small amounts of drugs. After the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter protests used Davis’s, “It is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist,” as its unofficial tagline.
Her pioneering 1981 book Women, Race & Class remains relevant today. Davis applies Marxist analysis to the intersectional relationship of capitalism with race, gender, and class. She demonstrates how white male supremacy and class exploitation has interacted to uphold and reinforce the global system of oppression and social inequality.
Davis covers topics including the fight for Black suffrage; working class Black women and domestic labour; the strong ties between the long history of falsely accusing Black men of rape and the history of lynching and incarceration of Black men, as well as reproductive rights and the appropriation of birth control by eugenics. Poor Black women are triply oppressed, by class, race, and sex. Davis begins with an account of slavery in which virtually all Black women were field hands. This gave their free female descendants a legacy of hard work, perseverance, self-reliance, and insistence on sexual equality, “for a new womanhood.’’ Davis sets this against contemporary Black women’s issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care.
In Frederick Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, gender inequality accompanies the advent of private property. Housework became associated with ‘women’s work,’ resulting in the devaluation of domestic work. After World War II media portrayed domestic work as the natural vocation of all women.
Black women have been harder hit by such exploitation due to their race as well as class. In the US, maids and domestic cleaners are predominantly Black women or migrants.
Davis argues that the feminist movement was co-opted by racism, eugenics, and transphobia. Through socialism the Black community can build alliances and create an understanding of their common oppression and thereby unify and triumph against the ruling class. For Davis, “Freedom is a constant struggle,” in which Black women in the US must be committed to solidarity and the socialist movement, as the ruling class attempts to use social differences to create division and mistrust to weaken the movement. In a 2017 speech, Davis declared, “I’m not a feminist! I am a revolutionary!”
Davis argues for the de-sexualisation of domestic labour, which should be incorporated into the industrial economy. Socialised housework would require large government subsidies for the working class to access such services. Child care should be socialised as should meal preparation. Housewives should be paid, as they produce a commodity for the household. The replenishment of workers’ labour-power is a prerequisite for the process of social production, by maintaining the production of all classes.
According to the Women’s Bureau of US Department of Labor Domestic workers, domestic staff are home care workers, house cleaners, and nannies, who provide specialised care to households and families. There are more than 600,000 domestic workers employed directly by private households, of which women make up 82 per cent of personal care aides, 95 per cent of maids and housekeepers and 97 percent of childcare providers.
In 1981 Davis wrote on themes relevant in the 1970s. One issue at the discussion was that there was not enough written about LGBTQ+ issues.
Forty years later some may see weaknesses in her text, yet it remains a very useful Marxist analysis, which will prove useful in Education School discussion groups.
Women, Race & Class, as well as Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, and Women Culture & Politics, all by Angela Davis are available at our online shop section. See
cpa.org.au/product-tag/angela-davis/
