Women’s Programme of the Communist Party of Austria

INTRODUCTION

Based on the commitment of women comrades over several decades to women’s rights as well as on already existing resolutions and on action-oriented policies, the KPÖ was the first Party to adopt a women’s programme at a conference on women’s policy, in June 1990. Developments and theoretical discussions of the last years called for revising and re-editing it.

Record unemployment and increasing poverty affecting ever broader strata of the population are the main hallmarks of neo-liberal economic policy.

Women are disproportionately afflicted by this development. Social and emancipatory achievements are being liquidated step by step, women are being degraded to the positions of servants. In Austria, nearly one million women are working on the so-called informal labour market, not covered by protective labour legislation. The decision to have children is increasingly becoming an option for luxury, life with children a poverty trap. At the same time, we witness an accumulation of wealth in the hands of a very small minority.

To start, we will take position on three questions arising from the theoretical debates of the last few years:

	the relationship of class and gender and the need for drawing up a specific programme;
	a new definition of the concept of work;
	the need for women’s specific commitment. Already more than 200 years ago, Olympe de Gouges said quite unequivocally that human rights also have a gender . A routinely formulated right does not mean at all that it can be perceived by all in the same way. Discriminating against women or, to put it differently, favouring men, is not tied to capitalism alone, Patriarchal conditions of repression are the first ones manifested in human history, and they penetrate all class societies. Even socialist progress did not protect women from a two-fold work load and motherhood ideology.

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The correlation between class and gender - just as between class and ethnicity - can only be determined in each concrete case. But it is possible to point to the following marked features:

1. We want to place women’s conditions of life and women themselves as acting subjects into the centre of thinking and acting, with a view to overcoming the lack of history, theory and politics. That is why there is a need for a special women’s programme.

2. One has to look at the entire context of women’s lives, which means to understand the structural connection betwenn production and reproduction to put a stop to the practice of pointing out to women partial areas or contradictions, such as work and family, mother and working woman, etc.

3. Our foremost demand is to perceive gender as well as class as a social structural category which presents social inequalities and power relations, privileges and discriminations, and which is an entity of its own vis- -vis the class structure.

Discussions among the left have led by now to the uncontested understanding that a new terminology is needed for the concept of labour. For, if housework does not create surplus value - the systematic obfuscation of this socially necessary, unpaid work which creates utility value, and its exclusion from the concept of labour, dims the view for the typical hall marks of female labour: a two-fold workload, wage discrimination, inferior qualification, etc. are the typical labels of capitalist female labour, the causes of which will be found mainly in the gender-hierarchical division of labour. In our systematization we differentiate between work (i.e. in the sense of all socially necessary work) and remunerative work (i.e. wage labour), purposely using the term not remuneratively employed, because for women that does not mean being out of work.

Looking at the historical workers’ and proletarian women’s movements, it becomes clear that the revolutionary purpose was not in each case progress for the cause of women. On the one hand, there was the idea of socialization of housework - wrongly predicted, as it turned out - and on the other, men’s participation in the work for the family and the liquidation of the gender-hierarchical division of labour was no basic demand. Women’s public participation in earning a livelihood, in education and politics could not prevent their private subjugation. The idea of middle class snugness, the dream of the happy home, as seen from the position of I am the lord of the manor , found its way also into working class families.

Just as the anticapitalist orientation, the antipatriarchal orientation has to be part of a common strategy. It seems to us that the precondition for change is not giving up the class struggle but rather eliminating the historic gender compromise. Without a political struggle against male privileges, women will not achieve subject-status. The gender struggle requires a female space, female identity, authenticity, partisanship and autonomy.

This programme is a contribution aimed at sharpening sensibilities - inside as well as outside the KPÖ - regarding the interlocking of capitalism and patriarchate. It is a call for an autonomous commitment by women, for they alone can bring about their liberation.

CHAPTER 1

Women on Their Way into the New Millenium

Women constitute more than half of the world’s population. They carry out two thirds of the socially necessary work, yet they receive only ten per cent of the world’s income and own 0.98 per cent of the world’s property. Their annual work performance - either evaluated far too low or not at all - amounts to 11 billion dollars. These sober UN-statements show that economic and patriarchal power relations are a global problem. Existing attempts at countering patriarchal domination are increasingly falling victim to neo-liberal social theory and economic policy, under the spell of globalisation and competition. The growing strength of nationalistic, fundamentalist religious movements, biologistic or anti-feminist ideologies, of neo-fascist, radical right-wing trends is one of the consequences.

Worldwide Exploitation of Women

Today’s capitalism is dominated by a few monopolistic financial and industrial giants. Regulations on the part of states, international finance and money institutions and regional integration serve their interests in the first place. Thanks to the liberalisation of the money markets, all forms of money and credit capital have grown more rapidly. Financial transactions and speculations are taking on tremendous dimensions and increasing at a precipitous rate, while detaching themselves from the concrete production process, thus sapping the foundations of goods and labour markets.

In the centres of capitalism - the US, Japan, Western Europe - we find a compact concentration of wealth and power. Yet, despite extravagance and luxury, poverty is increasing, and poverty is mainly female: women earn less, suffer out of proportion from unemployment and social cuts and often are not adequately provided for when they are old. In order to ensure optimum conditions for the capital factor, drastic cuts are operated worldwide in the public and social sectors; privatisation of state and other public services as well as the whittling down of trade union rights and of protective labour legislation are daily capitalist routine. Poverty and social destitution are augmenting, affecting large sections of the middle class while the wealth and extravagance of a small elite of capital and property owning tycoons are reaching unprecedented proportions. Of the estimated 1,3 billion people living in poverty the world over, more than 70 per cent are women (UN Report on Human Development, 1995). Also on the world scale, men control 90 per cent of all incomes measured in money.

Women in the EU - a Male Dominated Mansion

With the advent of the inter-European market, the European countries have become exposed to increasing pressure to adjust. This integration has prised open areas of traditional national balance of interest, subjecting them to sustained competitive deregulation. The social systems come under additional pressure due to the anticipated Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) whose entrance fee is compliance with the Maastricht criteria.

Efficient counter-measures against unemployment fall victim to rigid Maastricht budgetary planning which forces women out of the work process. For, given their specific life situations, they can participate in the play of the of the free (labour) market to a limited extent only. The possibilities of action by public bodies are restricted to market functions and to safeguarding unfettered competition. Sowing dissension and marginalization of parts of the population are needed as a motor of competition and form the basis of a two-thirds society, with women on the losing side. Whereas the women’s movement regards the repression of women as a comprehensive system of capitalist-patriarchal conditions of exploitation, the EU bodies adhere to a strictly confined disadvantage concept which applies exclusively in the sphere of earning a livelihood. The rigid separation of work and family spheres forms the basis of this understanding and finds its confirmation in various verdicts of the European Court of Justice (such as its findings regarding the third guiding principle on equal treatment, which resolved that women who had been in the work process for a number of years and withdrew from it to raise their children were no longer to be counted among the working population). It is just this separation which acts as the transmission belt of women’s discrimination and which for hundreds of years has served as a pretext to exclude women from public life. The prevailing basic model of a typically male earning history is the reason why women, because of their discontinuous employment pattern (disrupted working and thus money-earning life), find themselves very often outside the jurisdiction of EU guidelines. In all EU countries, the convergency criteria serve to justify a rigid policy of budgetary consolidation to the detriment of measures aimed at social consolidation. For large sectors of the population the Common European House is developing into a poorhouse: the final years of the millenium witness over 20 million unemployed and more than 50 million poor.

Militarization of Society

At the same time, gigantic financial means are devoted to arms build-up and militarization.The sealing of EU external frontiers according to the Schengen agreement and the new command structures inside NATO are aimed at conflict resolution by military means and at military intervention. NATO continues to adhere to its concept of nuclear weapons’ use, and new alliance members have to conform. Austrian membership in the WEU and NATO is irreconcilable with our country’s permanent neutrality.

Although the majority of Austrians and in particular the women, are against accession to NATO and for maintaining Austrian neutrality, the coalition government - under massive pressure by the Austrian People’s Party and gradual surrender by the Social Democratic Party - is striving for it. Contrary to promises made by members of government and other political figures before Austria’s accession to the EU, that Austris would continue as a neutral state inside the Union, schemes are underway to annul Austria’s permanent neutrality, inscribed in its Constitution. The assertion that NATO has fundamentally changed serves as an argument to move in this direction. According to its own definition, NATO is a collective defence system, whereas according to international law, neutral states do not participate in foreign wars, except for military and economic measures ordered and sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Joining NATO would not only impose heavy financial obligations on Austria; it would involve our country in dangerous militarization potentialities and block any possibility for Austria to contribute - as a neutral state - to the establishment of an efficient system of European and world security, based on confidence building, disarmament and demilitarization.

Austrian permanent neutrality is an extremely valuable peace promoting factor for the benefit of all countries of the world, which during the past years and decades contributed to enhance aggression-free coexistence among states.

The KPÖ women’s proposals for safeguarding peace are as follows: instead of tightening the arms spiral and strengtheing undemocratic military structures, it is necessary to invigorate international disarmament. Giving women the opportunity to serve in the national armed forces is not a step towards emancipation, but a sign of growing militarization and brutalization of society. Equal rights are not furthered by opening up the armed forces to women but rather by a gradual abolition of all military structures culminating in the abolition of the federal armed forces and reallocation of resources thus saved to social and democratic reforms. Safeguarding peace in Europe and in the world requires dialogue among states, restraining military logic and reducing military potential. The KPÖ women will support with all the means at their disposal the continuation of Austria’s status of neutraity and the struggle against accession to NATO and demand a nationwide referendum on this momentous decision.

Women under Pressure to Conform

The dramatic changes which occurred after the failure of the first global socialist challenge afflict the working population of all countries. Old and new contradictions and defects of capitalism are manifesting themselves now without the superimposed phenomenon of two contesting systems. The women in the formerly socialist countries are experiencing a sharp change in their living conditions, due to the socio-political transformation. On the one hand, the free market economy provided them with additional possibilities for travel and consumption - within the limits of their financial means -, and on the other hand they are faced with the freedoms of capitalist economic logic: social insecurity, cuts in the area of social gains - such as free child-care possibilities -, unemployment, poverty, in many countries hunger and lack of the barest means of subsistence. Women are the main victims of the sweeping political and economic changes which are often accompanied by new forms of nationalism, racism and violence against people of different ethnic origins, cultures and religions.

The so-called third world is not separate from the first world: both are but two sides of the same coin. Without the cheap raw materials and low labour costs in the third world the capitalist centres could not maintain their enormous profits. Some developing countries ( threshold countries ) were able to improve their economic positions as target areas for investments and profits by transnational companies. But on the whole, the developing countries are facing increased impoverishment and almost complete subordination to international finance capital, given their crippling foreign indebtedness and the rigid structural adjustment programmes imposed on them by the capitalist logic of profitability. For hundreds of millions of women this means that to a large extent they alone with their work power are responsible for their families’ reproduction. Very often this means hunger, extreme hardship and cruel struggle for their own and their children’s survival. Warlike conflicts on nationalistic, ethnic or religious grounds and increasing destruction of the environment (deforestation of rain forests, imports of poisonous waste from countries of the first world , use of herbicides as well as poisoned nuclear test sites) further aggravate women’s living conditions: millions are in flight, subsisting miserably in camps, on refuse disposal dumps or in the slums of big cities.

Patriarchal Structures, Sexism, Racism

Being at the mercy of colonial patriarchal structures or fundamentalist traditions signifies for many women, moreover: to be sold as a young girl to an unknown husband; to be hungry; to be removed to homelands, reservations, slums; in many countries to suffer all their lives from physical and psychological mutilation; to be exposed to physical and even life-threatening persecution, social ostracism and vested traditional patterns.

Countries like Thailand or the Philippines were degraded to brothels for international sex tourism at the disposal of men from Western Europe, the United States and Japan. Women and girls from developing countries and in a growing measure also from formerly socialist countries provide a constant supply for the brisk human trade carried on by mafia organisations, procurer cartels and also for marriage-crazy philistines in the capitalist metropoles. The rapid spreading of diseases, such as, for example, AIDS and of scourges that had been assumed vanquished, such as smallpox, is another facet of this situation. The porno industry also cashes in on the poverty of women and children, as do prestigious companies, in the first place in the field of pharmaceutics, chemistry and food production, who exploit subjugation and patriarchal structures of the so-called second and third world to maximize their profits: children are mutilated to serve as raw matrerial deposits for organ transplants, women are abused for mass experiments (e.g. birth control) or forced to be sterilized in the course of birth control programmes. In addition, new procreation technologies are experimented with to attest women’s contemptibility: forced abortion of female foetuses, business deals with surrogate mothers and insemination experiments with women as raw material .

International Women’s Solidarity

The international women’s meetings during the United Nations Decade for Women were proof of a new quality of women’s solidarity and cooperation. The international women’s conferences of the UN set free important impulses for this development. All states endorsed the Forward-Looking Strategies up to the Year 2000" which affirm:

Peace and disarmament are the preconditions for equality and development; the problems of women are inextricably linked to national development and global threats; war means destruction, and even without military confrontation arms buildup signifies destruction of resources and draining of enormous financial means which are needed for the solution of global and social problems.

Although the conditions under which women are living in today’s world differ greatly, it is becoming increasingly evident everywhere that women are no longer willing to accept their subordinate position in a spirit of self-sacrifice as something decreed by nature or fate. In ever greater numbers women are prepared to espouse the cause of their emancipation with verve. They are making themselves heard more and more and exert pressure on governments: women’s movements have become important social and political factors internationally.

In the developing countries women, together with the progressive movements, demand a new international economic order, to be able to lead a life worthy of human beings. To them the struggle for independence and self-determination means also to claim their own women’s rights and to defend these rights after the victory of the liberation movements. All over the world women play an active part in the peace, civil rights and environmental movements, demanding respect for nature and a sense of social responsibility when introducing or developing new technologies. In trade unions and in social movements women fight for a more equitable distribution of earnings and wealth and muster their solidarity in opposition to the mighty fraternity of corporations.

On the international level, the women’s movements have validated the women’s demand to participate, on the basis of equality, in the elaboration of political decisions. They no longer accept being strictly limited to partial areas of the political struggle, thus recalling that the extent of women’s emancipation is the measuring rod of general emancipation . Everywhere in the world women’s liberation is a basic principle of all movements striving for social change.

Our Orientations

The United Nations International Women’s Conference in Nairobi pointed to the extreme importance of disarmament which serves global security and liberates vast material resources for such urgent problems as hunger, destruction of the environment, poverty, diseases and illiteracy. In this spirit we stand for the banning of war and for worldwide nuclear, biological, chemical, and conventional disarmament.

We actively support all efforts leading to strengthening international cooperation aimed at disarmament and safeguarding peace. We manifest our solidarity with the women of the developing countries in their struggle against exploitation, racism, sexism, and for improving their conditions of life.

We manifest our solidarity with the women of those countries that had entered upon the difficult and contradictory road to socialism in the hope of building a new, equitable and humane society. They stood for changes in their countries and find themselves now, after the upheavals, defrauded of this objective.

We are struggling together with all those who are standing for a society free of exploitation, violence, domination, and humiliation. We are fighting for a socialist Europe in which the focal point is people’s conditions of work and life. Our guidelines are democratic, anti-fascist projects of society, and we feel closely linked to the women in the whole world in the struggle for emancipation, for a tolerant humane culture, for peace and social justice.

In Austria, we are fighting for the continuation of our country’s permanent neutrality,guaranteed by our Constitution, and against the accession to a military alliance, such as NATO or WEU, to prevent a further militarization of our society through the arms build-up of our army and forces of order in the spirit of conformity with NATO and Schengen. ATS 500 million is the price we have to pay to make our frontiers secure, which equals the amount of money saved by the government by reducing two Karenzjahre (partially paid maternity leave plus the guaranteed right to return to the work place) to eighteen months.

We are opposed to the endeavours aimed at creating a professional army (in Austria we have compulsory military service - at present 8 months) and demand the reduction of military expenditures for the federal army and in the long run its abolition. The resources thus saved should be used in the fight against poverty, social cuts and for development aid.

We are also committed to equitable and ecologically acceptable international trade and economic relations which presuppose the immediate cancellation of debts by the developing countries. Development projects must also serve the promotion of women, which requires the provision of adequate means and their allocation unter democratic public control.

As a party whose women members actively participated in great numbers in the fight against Hitler fascism, many of whom paying with their lives, we feel particularly close to all who are engaged in the struggle against renascent fascism and rightwing extremism as well as against racism, violence and sexism.

Our political struggle for women’s rights over their own bodies is directed against all forms of sexual exploitation and human trade as well as against medical experiments and developments in the field of genetic technology which are carried out to the detriment of women’ health and child-bearing capacity.

CHAPTER 2

For the Right to a Profession and to Education

For women, being professionally active means being economically independent and at the same time overcoming private isolation. In a woman’s life plan and within the framework of the social value system she enjoys esteem because of her self-determination and self-assurance. Yet, remunerative labour is not simply an activity with a view to earning money, regardless of the conditions or the type of work. Work is of paramount importance for the development of the personality and for society as a whole.

Most work done in capitalist society is wage labour. It is subject to the process of exploitation and often experienced as a scourge and as extraneously determined. Even so, remunerative labour, even under capitalist conditions, is more than just the economic guarantee of survival. It links people, is at the same time the purpose and the means of their cooperation and - depending on the professional standing - social recognition. The right to remunerative work, guarantee of economic survival, remains absolutely essential and is an important prerequisite in the struggle for women’s emancipation.

New technologies have thoroughly changed the world of labour. One of the consequences of capitalist use of these new technologies is that, though remunerative labour continues to exist, those who work experience growing isolation and individualization. Contrary to the industrial revolution of the 19th century, which gave rise to machine-made mass production, the new quality of modern information and communication technologies resides in their universal utilization. Brain work, complicated organizational processes are formalized and then subjected to automatization. Data processing apparatus, word processors, telecommunication lead to extensive rationalization in the field of office work and administration, in trade and in all spheres of human society. That means that steadily decreasing labour power is required for the production of socially needed goods and services. Yet this does not lead to a general reduction of work time and equitable distribution of all socially necessary work.

To realise the extent of unpaid but socially necessary labour is important for two reasons:

First of all, because the ignorance about and lack of appreciation of this type of work performed by women is at the same time a corner-stone for discrimination on the remunerative labour market. This ignorance regarding so-called feminine capabilities and skills which are demanded free of charge underlies the argument for inferior payment, with its corollary of widely spread poverty in old age. Accuracy, dexterity, perseverance, nervous staying power in the face of pressure of time and noise are appreciated as part and parcel of women’s productive capacity and are simply expected from them but, nota bene, without appropriate payment. The gap between men’s and women’s wages did not diminish in the last decades. On the average, women’s incomes do not amount to more than two-thirds of men’s incomes in comparable positions and with comparable qualifications. We find the lowest wages and most disadvantageous collective bargaining agreements in branches where mainly women are employed, (as, for instance, in the textile industry). Wages/salaries also depend on the evaluation of work, and this evaluation bears the stamp of the evaluator .

Secondly, because it invalidates the blaablaa about work fading away . Women in particular know a great deal about meaningful jobs which, if filled, would lighten their excessive work burden,: for instance by expanding the municipal infrastructure and public transport system, stepping up the construction of sufficient and affordable housing and child-care institutions or by creating work places in the area of environmental protection, so that, among other things,the steadily increasing number of children suffering from chest ailments could be reduced, etc.

Loss of Claim to Unemployment Benefits and Forced Labour

The economic boom at the end of the ‘eighties led to high growth rates and exceedingly fast-rising profits. But unemployment did not recede to the extent usual in times of boom. At the end of this century, a symmetrical, steep upward movement was registered for share prices and unemployment figures: as in all other EU countries, unemployment figures in Austria at present are higher than at any time in the last fifty years, and at the same time, bancruptcies and transfers of manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries have also reached record heights. Women, who already in the past had always been taken advantage of by employers as a reserve army, are in many respects the losers in a situation of increasing rivalry for rare remunerative work places and professional advancement: changed organizational planning, the required mobility and flexibility are at variance with the realities of women’s lives, which assign them reproduction work as their main field of activity with all its time-related and economic constraints. Women, prisoners for life in this diaper cycle , become easy prey for blackmail, whether they have childen or not: limited accession to and quicker ouster from the remunerative labour market, lower wages and reduced career chances are, as it were, the loss-liability of potential motherhood.

Official female unemployment figures - even of highly qualified (university trained) women - are higher than those of men, in toto and also per sector of the economy. Older women have practically no work perspectives, young girls find it most difficult to be apprenticed, and young women find few openings on the labour market, especially if they have no training beyond compulsory schooling. The drastic cuts in the field of active labour market policy affect first and foremost women earning a modest income on temporary projects. Moreover, under the motto of eliminating abuse , unemployment insurance benefits were reduced. The criteria of the labour market service, willingness to work and availability for the labour market raise unsurmountable obstacles, especially before mothers who have to look after their children: they are threatened with loss of unemployment or social security benefits, if they cannot accept a job offered to them because of their child care obligations. They have the choice between loss of benefits and forced labour.

More and more often, unemployed women - particularly in the country - constitute the potential for voluntary neighbourhood help or nursing work, either totally unpaid or paid below the official rate. These new social services are intended to compensate the subjective feeling of uselessness and also the devastating social cuts - for a pittance, and often not even that. This is the way to successfully obscure the problem. And given the fact that social benefits are essentially calculated in the light of male earning histories, many women lack material security all their lives: to a very large extent they depend on traditional marriage patterns and thus submit to the gender hierarchy, because a failed marriage often spells financial ruin.

The Process of Repression

In the ‘seventies, women advanced to more qualified occupations and better positions. Today we have a situation in which even women with university degrees often do not find adequate positions and - in order to avoid long-term unemployment - settle for office positions or even less qualified jobs. In this way a downward repressive spiral is set in motion which finally pushes women (but also men) with the least professional training into unemployment.

The fact that one part of the female work-force slides into the industrial reserve army, other women are pressured into part-time or temporary jobs, contract labour or into precarious occupational situations is of consequence also to women who have full-time jobs: very often they have to tolerate lower pay and dim chances of advancement. This also leads to intensified gender rivalry on the labour market. Added to that is the fact that qualified but less costly potential personnel from neighbouring countries to the east of Austria or from developing countries compete on the labour market, and on the other hand firms transfer their production to countries with lower production costs.

Sexual harassment at the workplace, mobbing are signs of an increasingly unhealthy labour world. The employers step up the pressure on women by depicting them as unsure workers/employees , because of possible pregnancies or sickness of a child. (In reality, they want to be sure of their reserve army.) There is absolutely no objective basis for this, as has been shown by research done on the work- and achievement-capacity of women. The psycho-terror is so unbridled that women have to undergo questioning on highly intimate matters in the course of job interviews or are even obliged to undergo a pregnancy test.

Part-Time Work

There is evidence that a steadily decreasing number of women want to work exclusively for their families all their lives. What characterizes a woman’s professional life is its discontinuity. Women no longer regard having a job as a temporary solution and, therefore, do not want to give it up because of a child/children. Women satisfy this two-fold desire by working part-time, which also means part-time earnings , reduced chances of promotion and greater work intensity. Thus it is hardly surprising that 70 per cent of the jobs created in the last ten years are part-time jobs. Only a very small number of women - mainly qualified ones, such as teachers - benefit from this part-time offensive. And yet: the dearth of qualified, well-paid part-time jobs with working hours which allow women to comply with their child-care obligations and, on the other hand, the lack of adequate child-care institutions often force women to leave the world of remunerative labour. It is not known how many women without remunerative labour disappear from the official statistics into their households. Very often, housewives and women working outside the home are pitched against each other. But, as a matter of fact, even a woman who finds her happiness in working exclusively for her family cannot be sure whether she will not one day have to or wish to take on remunerative work. Therefore, it is in the interest of all women to perceive the right to remunerative work - at a living wage - as a central concern, a right that has to be fought for.

Undermining Labour Legislation

Since the early ‘eighties, attacks on protective labour legislation, on regulations won through collective bargaining and on rights gained as a result of struggles have become more and more noticeable, and especially so for women. As already happened in the past, female wage earners are being used to establish new tactics of exploitation. This purpose is camouflaged by the magic formula of flexibilization which is supposed to suggest that everyone is able to organize his/her working time according to personal preference. But as a matter of fact, the opposite is true: working-hours are subordinated to the objective constraints of the respective firm or to EU regulations - as, for example, the annulment of the ban on night-work for women. At the centre of the strategy of deregulation and flexibilization are the unprotected work situations. The dramatic increase of insignificant employment, e.g. in retail- trade, disadvantages women in the first place, since they are insured in case of accidents only instead of having the normal insurance coverage (which covers unemployment, sickness and pension rights). Moreover, under the pressure of deregulation, completely new forms of occupation are offered - in the first place to women - , such as the home service . Under this system, the labour market provides private homes with contract work at minimal pay. It must strike one as cynical that the European Court of Law decided that exclusion of insignificantly employed persons from the normal compulsory insurance system does not constitute an act of gender discrimination.

Undermining labour legislation has meanwhile become daily routine in Austria: getting round protective labour regulations, whittling down of the compulsory period of notice and of other established rules, less co-determination at the workplace, weekend, Sunday and night-work, extension of working hours round the clock, work on call, legally, materially and socially undermined work situations, such as temporary employment, tele home-work, seasonal work, contract work, Mac jobs reduce the employers’ personnel costs, since they enable them to make the maximum use of their work force, according to the work available. They constitute a legal form of direct tax evasion. Unprotected employment, such as atypical work situations, affect women in diverse ways: kapovaz (capacity oriented variable work time) makes women shop assistants, part-time women teachers or highly qualified women computer specialists experience this deprivation of their rights in different ways, which is a handicap for a common action strategy. State-run programmes (such as Aktion 8ooo or training of women university graduates) have in the meantime fallen victim to our restrictive budget policy. While they were of help to some, they led to the expansion of atypical remunerative work situations and thus went in the same direction as the capitalist offensive. Today, legislation is limited to mere administrating and obscuring of unemployment: providing compulsory day labourer jobs or job training for the long-time unemployed are no surrogates for an offensive employment policy.

The Austrian lawmakers’ de-regulating measures are not only accepted by the leadership of the ÖGB (Austrian Trade Union Council) and the AK (Chamber of Labour): their representatives are even taking the initiative in Parliament with regard to extending opening hours in shops and to amending working time regulations. Manifestly safe positions conquered by the workers’ movement are surrendered step by step. Instead of reducing working hours, agreements are being signed on extending weekly working hours without financial compensation, without overtime pay, on the basis of flexible work time and weekend work. Because of their life situation, women often cannot comply with such requirements and are ousted from the labour process.

Contradictory Education Policy

Education is a prerequisite for professional advancement and individual self-fulfilment. The educational and vocational training policy determines to a high degree the individual’s position in the life of the community. Professional perspectives and chances of promotion - especially in view of the introduction of new technologies in the fields of production and services - are also closely linked to the availability of opportunities for continued study and vocational training ( life-long learning ). Here too, the two-fold work burden leads to involuntary abstention , and where training courses are offered by the firm men are favoured. What is called for is comprehensive extension of paid vocational training courses during working hours, based on individual needs and interests.

Formal access to education has become easier for girls: today, more girls than boys complete secondary school. Yet, this female education offensive has not led to the elimination of the hierarchization between men and women in the area of educational and vocational training. The results are underrated qualifications or qualifications which are not valued at all, fewer job opportunities and lower pay for working women.

The gender role - impressed on girls by their family ambience - influences many of them to choose traditional female professions, such as secretary, hairdresser or shop-assistant; all the more so because they have little or no chance to be accepted in traditional male professions. Another factor is the enormous lack of apprenticeships: even if girls decide to take up a typically female profession , they do not find the corresponding training place.

Jobs with good perspectives for the future prevail in the area of scientific-technical transformation. More and more women seize the opportunity to master the new technologies and enter this up to now male-dominated field of activities with a view to use these new technologies for qualified professional careers and to look at them critically from a female point of view. Nevertheless, this field is still male-dominated, and women need a great deal of stamina to ensure that justice is done to their capabilities.

Education policy is guided by the so-called selection of an elite, by competitive thinking, with groups of various types of achievers rather than by a comprehensive school with polytechnical orientation. The actual scheme fits capitalist profitability needs which require on the one hand an unskilled or half-skilled cheap workforce, flexible according to the economic situation and on call for work in the firm or in the home, and on the other hand highly skilled personnel with varying qualifications. The standard of qualifications set by the EU exacerbates this selection, particularly for women. The path followed is: sponsoring of talent , i.e. the elite, in private education establishments and at the same time insisting on austerity in the public education sector. This social selection is underpinned by restrictive austerity measures in the public education sector and increased financial burdens for the parents.

In 1996, the most powerful protests since the end of the war by secondary school and university students, provoked by the austerity policy of the government coalition of SPÖ (Social Democratic Party) and ÖVP (People’s Party) could not prevent deep cuts in the education sector: costs for teaching equipment, school manuals, afternoon surveillance and other school services have to be borne by the parents or paid for by winning business sponsoring in exchange for desired publicity. Cuts affecting pupils’ and students’ free season tickets, family allowances, scholarships as well as the introduction of university fees which is already under discussion create the preconditions for a new educated elite from which all those affected by economic constraints will be increasingly barred. Budget cuts at schools and universities have led to very negative results: overcrowded classes and lecture halls on the one hand and unemployed teachers and university personnel on the other, increased dependence on private capital, due to the need for private financing, lower standards because vocational colleges are entirely guided by capitalist requirements, and lastly the institution of crash courses. Resources for scientific research are taken from Austrian universities and paid into EU funds from which only a fraction finds its way back to Austria.

Elitist Male-Dominated Domains

Almost half the university students are women. And yet: nearly every fifth girl student breaks off her studies already after the first year. The reasons for this are the traditional role models, prejudices against women in scientific work, lack of general support in the community, and above all limited financial possibilities of working-class students. Moreover, students who are mothers find it very difficult to withstand the pressure imposed by their studies and by financial constraints.

This disproportion is reflected - after 100 years of women’s admission to universities! - all over the entire elitist and male-oriented world of science: assistant professorships are still male domains, not more than 4,4 per cent of the full professors are women. Specific research on women is carried out in a small university ghetto, constantly threatened by financial starvation; methodical and epistemological approaches have hardly any bearing on the output of knowledge. And last but not least, the university austerity measures specifically affect visiting women lecturers who have a big share in university teaching and research on the subject of women. Even if women succeed in overcoming all the obstacles in the university world, they are still handicapped in their professional careers compared to their male colleagues, despite the same qualifications. The percentage of unemployed women academics is twice as high as that of their male colleagues.

Our Orientations

The right to education is a prerequisite for ensuring equal chances for all children/adolescents. The result of this would not be a levelling-down process, as conservatives try to make us believe, but rather the possibility to implement practice-oriented studies and teamwork in small classes and interest groups. In such a setting pedagogues could more easily promote individual talents. A democratic system of education (comprehensive schools, including free supervision in the afternoons) without any dead ends, which would stimulate sustained acquisition of knowledge and skills would benefit girls from modest backgrounds in particular. The struggle for free access to education, for places in vocational colleges and universities and for jobs, the rallying of opposition against the restrictive austerity policy at schools and universities calls for solidarity and for the understanding that the creation of elites splits our society, leaving the less privileged by the roadside.

Remunerative work is the basis of any progressive socio-political alternative based on social justice. That signifies the right to meaningful work at a living wage for all with payment according to the work done. From this flows the need to re-evaluate women’s work.

Full employment must at the same time also guarantee a minimum income for all. The areas of environment protection, public transport, city reconstruction, housing, social services as well as the energy sector offer the potential for new, highly qualified jobs with perspectives for the future. Instead of re-distributing the social surplus product from the wage-earners to domestic and foreign companies and to finance capital, it should serve to guarantee all men and women a decent livelihood and a life in human dignity.

What is required are comprehensive state-run employment offensives, the promotion of women, also by establishing quotas, as an integral part of employment programmes with various possibilities for obtaining higher qualifications and attending study courses.

The state will have to activate the still remaining levers in the field of economic policy and create new ones. The existing informal sector must be socially integrated and made secure.

We also demand that migrants be given the same access to remunerative work and training-programmes as well as to all benefits of the social security system.

Women need more time and more money! A radical cut of paid working hours without loss of pay, re-evaluation and re-distribution of all work needed by the community would result in more time. More time and money would be the result of day nurseries and day centres for school children, free of charge. And above all, we need a radical re-distribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.

CHAPTER 3

About the Social Risk of Being a Woman

The pivotal point of the subjugation of women in capitalist society is the gender-hierarchical division of labour with the one-sided assignment of housework to women at its centre. While production is organized in teams, the restoration of the capacity to work is largely done privately. Yet, this reproductive work is also part and parcel of exploitation, since capitalist logic requires to keep the costs for the restoration of the capacity to work as low as possible. Unpaid chores, privately performed and assigned to women, such as nursing sick or elderly family members, reflect patriarchal traditions as welll as capitalist profitability calculations, a trend that is gaining ground rapidly within the framework of budget consolidation with its government-sanctioned cuts of social benefits.

Patriarchal Structures

While it is true that the perception of male and female roles has somewhat changed in the past years, and men, too, contribute, albeit gingerly, to the reproduction process, the social code still reads: men are relieved of the responsibility of raising children and of the daily chores and can, therefore, devote more time, commitment and continuity to their professional obligations. And this all the more, since the elimination process on the remunerative labour market offers real men better prospects. At the same time, the re-assignment and privatization of social obligations in the reproductive area require real women . Are-activation of conservative attitudes (such as the wish to embed the family in our Constitution) is the ideological accompaniment of this trend.

Women’s unilateral responsibility for housework is not the only reason for their family obligations which lie at the root of their handicap on the labour market: The equation of biological and social motherhood is another factor. Only by taking recourse to punctilious calculations, tremendous self-discipline and abnegation can women muster the stamina, reliability, flexibility and mobility in their work which are required by the capitalist rat race, if - at the same time - they are to come up with the energy required for household and nurturing work. Many seek fulfilment in their home and in motherhood. Sometimes this conveys the sort of strength which makes it appear as though the reproduction process were a female power base. Today this goes on under conditions of austerity in the official social policy, thus augmenting the pressure on increasingly private (i.e. female) reproductive work.

Housework, Partnership, Division of Labour

Housework is socially necessary work. It serves the restoration of the human working capacicity and the raising of the future generation. This requires not only certain kinds of food, infrastructures and services; it also requires leisure time management for physical and mental relaxation. Class, size of the family and regional differences determine the content of housework. Its level and its extent depend on the economic situation of a given society and the political relationship of forces (how much do I earn and how long do I have to work for that and under what kind of conditions?). The home is the place where goods for personal use are produced, which distinguishes this activity from value-producing work. The latter finds its value determined by the market, namely via competition in the form of its sales price. Since housework does not produce anything for the market it is unproductive, according to capitalist utilization logic. In a society in which value is measured in the form of money value, the worth of a worker is also measured by the amount of his or her pay. And since housework is done free of charge, it is not considered real work . The division of labour assigns women repetitive, invisible activities - cooking, cleaning, washing, etc.- i.e. activities which are considered to be women’s natural characteristics . Their unquestioned responsibility for this is brought home to them by society as a whole and accepted by them. And there are many women who regard this work as an integral part of their personalities, as compared to the alienated world of labour.

In this way women are assigned the social responsibility for all those spheres of life which are not regulated by the market. Even women who go to work can at the most count on their husband’s/partner’s assistance. Although technical appliances are increasingly used in households, it must not be overlooked that there are also new demands, such as new hygienic requirements. Furthermore, new activities have surfaced (e.g. sorting and disposal of refuse), and changing individual requirements counteract an effective reduction of household activities. Moreover, the deterioration of the public system of providing for the sick and elderly has led to an increase of nursing work in the home.

The compulsion of women - inherent in our social structure - to do unpaid housework is not limited to providing in the material sense (shopping, preparing meals, care of the house and clothes). Above all, there is the woman’s competence for the husband’s/partner’s emotional wellbeing and for the family’s psychological stability. And yet, the extent of women’s work in the field of family interrelationships is hardly noticed.

The term two-fold work load does not really cover all the manifold demands - including the basic ones. Women are supposed to manifest assertiveness in the world of remunerative labour and at the same time be the fountains of selfless love in the family. These completely divergent requirements tax a woman’s personality. But apart from that, women’s competence in the field of human relationships, not only within the family, is called upon in their workplace and all other social acitivites. Women are not only suppressed in the same way as men and on top of that have to bear additional burdens, but their suppression is of another quality.

Increased Demands

Professional work and qualifications have altered women’s consciousness. They demand more from partnership relations: attentiveness, love and affection, intellectual exchange and fulfilled sexuality are the needs that have found expression. Insufficient socio-economic security, stress, wear and tear of nerves and body, emotional alienation clash with these demands and form the background of gruelling conflicts and dependencies. The ideal of a lifelong marriage has become fragile. A new self-image which makes women unwilling to continue to renounce their claims leads them to demand the adequate social prerequisites.

A striking development of the last two decades in Austria is the fading lustre of the institution of marriage: almost every third marriage, in urban areas often every other marriage, ends in divorce. The desire to have a child no longer depends on the institution of marriage. The ominous shotgun marriages in the case of pregnancies play an insignificant role today, and the number of illegitimate children is rising. But these days, against the background of increasing economic insecurity, the trend towards marriage is again gaining ground while at the same time the wish to have children is getting weaker. The desire for individualization in a so-called singles society with its comsumer and leisure time compulsions makes children appear more and more a financial risk and an impediment.

All the same, the social transformation of the past years has left its traces with regard to attitudes vis- -vis children. This is reflected in a greater readiness to do justice to a child’s needs, in the rejection of authoritarian, violent behaviour, in longer periods of breast-feeding, but also in the discussions about active fatherhood. It is true, that sometimes the new fathers adhere to reactionary biologistic ideologies: the right to their own flesh and blood occasionally degenerates into a power-struggle over custody of the child, in the course of which biological fatherhood takes precedence over social responsibility for the child. And quite often the quarrel round the father`s right of custody is motivated by financial considerations with a view to reduce alimony payments. On the other hand, the husband’s/partner’s readiness to take on some of the housework has hardly increased. Even women who go out to work are still left with the lion’s share of the household chores. Fathers usually take on occupations with children which are fun - playing and sports (on the average half an hour daily), while the fulltime working mother is left with all the tasks of providing and nurturing (on the average one and a quarter hours daily). Obviously, this means that women have less free time at their disposal to participate in political or cultural activities. Quite definitely, there is no question of fifty-fifty : In the days of new economic transformations (more than ever, time is money) the timorous beginnings of a new gender-role comportment suffer a decline.

Family Policy and Child Care

Lone mothers (i.e. women who have the sole responsbility for bringing up their child/children), workers’ families, unemployed men and women but more and more also families of employees or people working in the public sector who have three or more chldren are poverty-threatened. Actually, the qustion whether or not both partners work and earn or only one and how much they earn has more bearing on the situation than the number of children. Thus an active wage- and full employment- policy is at the same time also the best family-policy. Proponents of a conservative family-policy try to hide this effect of poverty factors on families by advocating the taxing of family incomes or the tax-splitting of spouses. A change of the Austrian system of individual taxation would be more detrimental to lower incomes, and with the splitting system the tax savings would grow in proportion to the amount earned. Tax breaks for one-breadwinner families are a financial compensation for the non-working partner and are generally paid to the man. They cement the role of the woman as the one who does the reproduction work out of love without any individual right to an income, which absolutely fits the capitalist costs-profits calculations. If the social net tears apart, the family is supposed to step into the breach. Private solutions are the order of the day, because the restrictive budget policy, needed to comply with Maastricht criteria, leaves less money available for children, the sick, the handicapped and old people. The reduction of the Geburtenbeihilfe (money paid to mothers after the birth of a baby) from ATS 15.000.-- to ATS 2.000.-- led to a dramatic drop in the Mutter-Kind-Paß health checks which are very important for the early detection of children’s health problems.

Considerable sums of money are spent on military projects - such as the sealing of EU external frontiers -, on politicians’ privileges and on subsidies to Austrian and foreign-owned firms. Conservative family strategies do not aim at a redistribution of these sums, but rather at voluntary, unpaid work performed by women. Faced with a lack of affordable childcare institutions (cr ches, nursery schools, kindergartens, comprehensive schools) mothers usually have no choice but to interrupt their remunerative employment for a short or longer period of time. This disregards the situation of women living alone with their child/children and of impecunious families who can neither afford three or more children’s years spent by the mother at home nor private care by a nanny or day mother. The ruling of the Constitutional Court to grant tax breaks on childcare and child support costs favours families with higher incomes and is thus a strking example of patriarchal class justice.

Although the pedagogical value of kindergartens for the development of social learning (at least starting at the age of three) is by now generally undisputed, there are not enough of them in Austria. The pedagogical level (size of the children’s groups), opening times (closure at midday, closures or partial closures during holidays) and the fees vary considerably from region to region. This clearly puts children from working class, peasant and big families at a disadvantage. In this area, too, the state shirks its responsibility by increasing the fees for public kindergartens and on the other hand relying more and more on private kindergartens.

Given the fact that the systems for social protection take as their guideline the male uninterrupted earning history - regardless of social reality - the unsolved childcare problem turns the reproduction trap into a poverty trap. The reduction of the two year maternity leave, coupled with the simultaneous lack of cr ches and also of qualified work places, has exacerbated the situation of single mothers in particular. They are threatened with compulsory labour, regardless of their childcare obligations, in miserably paid cleaning jobs or insignificant occupations. In view of the widening gap between male and female wages it is worse than cynical to sell this reduction as a chance for a more equitable distribution of nurturing duties between the sexes. For, apart from material pressures, the fear of losing their job forces even well-meaning men to limit their reproduction work.

The vaunted freedom of choice between job and family is non-existent for the majority of women. It does not exist for unemployed women, for women who are the sole breadwinners of their families and certainly not for the growing number of lone mothers and women bachelors nor for tens of thousands of women in our country who cannot work outside the home because there are not enough childcare institutions and who are not officially counted as unemployed.

This cycle which was and still is prevalent lies at the root of a structure that continuously produces the hierarchical gender relationships which ensure the availability of a female work force suitable for capitalist utilization logic and which also facilitates its exploitation in the private sphere. In this way, patriarchal structures are continuously reproduced.

A Cycle of Discriminations

A woman’s commitment to her family, founded on the supposed difference in her essential nature, lends itself to upholding property and power structures. The generally accepted family model serves capitalist profit interests to get the socially necessary work for the reproduction of work power as far as possible done without pay. And yet, from the outset a marked contradiction has existed between conservative family ideology with its limiting of women to activities in the home and capitalist economic interests aimed at using female labour for production as required. The state blunts this contradicton with its family policy which is adjusted to the fluctuations of the market and thus creates an area of tension for political and ideological battles.

The systematic discrimination of women in the world of remunerative labour and the assignment of unpaid work to women find their continuation in the area of pension rights. Nearly 70 per cent of pensioners entitled to additional compensatory payments are women; women constitute the vast majority of permanent recipients of social security benefits; their average old age pension in the statutory pension insurance scheme (1996: ATS 7.922.--) is well below that paid out to men (1996: ATS 13.879.--). Another feature which characterizes the patriarchal structure of our social insurance scheme is that a large proportion of women have no claim to social benefits by themselves but only as mothers of their husbands’ children, as part of the family left behind after the husband’s death. Above all,women who worked exclusively as housewives during their married life are often faced with poverty after a divorce or when they get old.

For many women new perspectives open up between the ages of 40 to 60: the children have become independent, and the women are able to concentrate fully on their profession or to try to re-enter professional life after a family phase. But society offers women only few possibilities to unfold their potentialities. On the labour market, female workers/employees are depreciated as old beginning at 35 already. The best years in a woman’s life , highly praised by the fashion and cosmetics industries, often signify: returning to work is difficult, if not impossible, because the family interval impeded professional qualification or improvement. This missed connection forces many women into unqualified positions. Or, because there are no jobs, they remain dependent on their husbands, pushed into family work against their wishes. Unemployment of elderly women is rising at an alarming rate - and yet early retirement in case of unemployment or ill health has been made more difficult and, moreover, there is talk about raising the legal retirement age.

Bad pay, part-time work, atypical employment conditions result in low pension benefits and often lead to absolute insecurity in old age. Plans to base pension calculations on lebenslange Durchrechnungszeiträume i.e. to take the entire life span as basis, would lead to a further reduction of women’s pension benefits. Whether or not compensatory benefits are granted depends on the amount of the pension payments and (as also the granting of additional social benefits) on the amount of the household income. Thus, if the husband’s pension (or the joint household income) is too high, the woman loses her claim, even if she is the recipient of a minimum pension. Since for many women their own pension is so small, their widow’s pension only just keeps them from falling below the minimum required for existence. In the case of divorce, the woman loses the status of wife and with that the right to a widow’s pension or at least a good part of it. Female poverty is, therefore, also a punishment for abandoning the established marriage model.

Trends towards Expulsion

The cycle of women’s discrimination punishes specially those women who do fit into the capitalist utilization logic. Some decades ago, the fascists created the category of worthless lives and simply murdered thousands of handicapped people. Today, in a society dominated by addiction to profit, the handicapped are regarded as lower quality workers/employees, and firms can buy themselves off from employing them with a pittance. The handicapped are victims of social cuts, most of them are poor and, therefore, practically negligible as consumers. Handicapped women often are victims of sexual harassment and rape. Doctors frequently carry out sterilization as a patent means of contraception. In the colourful consumers’ paradise which promises buyers youth, beauty and sexual fulfilment, the handicapped, mentally sick, old and worn-out are left outside. All this feeds trends of exclusion from a society which considers solidarity with the weak obsolete and leaves them to the mercies of charitable institutions.

These mercenary attitudes and lack of solidarity also leave their mark on the everyday life of migrants. Asked to come into the country some time ago as cheap labour force, they are today the targets of persecution and contempt. Xenophobia - fanned by official statements by some Austrian politicians - often leads to open hostility with regard to foreigners in their host country. The free for all struggle to make headway breeds fear and hatred and kindles prejudices regarding supposedly unjustified social benefits. It is a little-known fact that foreign workers/employees who have a work permit make the same social security payments as everyone else working in this country but claim fewer benefits than Austrians. Xenophobic attitudes were aggravated by the influx of people from our neighbouring countries to the East, whose labour power is bought by employers at dumping prices, often without any socio-legal basis: illicit work without work permit, temporary work, contract work, casual labour as, for instance, cleaning services, etc. burrow into rights fought for by the workers/employees. The social field of tension increasingly strengthens fascist, extremist right-wing trends and provides the ground for aggressive xenophobia. More and more often - and exacerbated by ever new official regulations - politically persecuted men and women are immediately returned to their countries of origin where they are often threatened with jail, torture and death.

What is also forgotten in this discussion is the real life situation of ethnic minorities in our country, as for instance the Carinthian and Styrian Slovenes, the Croats whose rights were enshrined in the Austrian State Treaty but never implemented in practice, or the rights of the Roma and Sinti, of the Czechs. Already some time ago, Turkish and ex-Yugoslav residents ought to have been counted among the ethnic contingents of our population who are refused basic rights. An integration of the peoples can only be achieved by promoting inter-cultural forms of living together at all levels of society and in all areas inhabited by people of different languages and nationalities.

Our Orientations

The struggle for improvements in the field of social legislaton, for reforms and laws, such as a comprehensive anti-discrimination law, quickens the awareness for possible changes. In the long run, these changes are not only meant to provide the necessary basics for the compatibility of job and reproduction work for women; the aim also is to bring about the redistribution and new evaluation of remunerative work and family work among the two sexes and to raise the questions: What work is meaningful? How are socially necessary activities to be allocated? What kind of technology do we need to produce goods and services for our everyday life?

Dissenting forms of living (community housing, marriage and partnerships, same gender couples, singles, single parents) should not give rise to discrimination. Tax and social legislation should be neutral with regard to all forms of cohabitation. A change from individual taxes to family splitting and taxing of spouses must be rejected as also plans to replace the compulsory state insurance with the obligation to choose one’s own insurance scheme, which is intended to promote private old age insurance schemes for the benefit of insurance companies.

What is necessary is a material safety net for all, regardless of their specific life style. We oppose the concept that the state protects and subsidizes only marriage as the sole form of cohabitation. The trend to a new inner life resulted in neglecting the discussion about the socialization of housework. Alternative concepts exist which call for the equitable sharing of housework between both sexes, but family work remains located in the private sphere. The demand for joint attempts at solutions for family work does not mean to us the end of intimacy and personal relationships, but rather better chances for their unfolding. Shorter worktime and facilitation of household chores create the conditions for the intensification of relationships, the strengthening of friendly contacts, for social, political and cultural activities.

We demand an increase of building activities with a view to providing sufficient and affordable housing for all, and at the same time we demand an end to fraudulent realty shams and the prosecution of key-money usury. Children’s day care institutions, open all day, should be improved qualitatively and made affordable. Small groups, good pedagogical staff, furthering of individual talents by offering adequate possibilities for creative and sports activities give children the chance to gain social skills and independence beyond the family circle. Easing the parents’ material worries will provide more time for playing together, for sport and cultural interests.

We stand for a guaranteed minimum standard of living, as an immediate step for the eradication of poverty, as well as for a comprehensive reform of all existing social sytems and against their privatization. The legal insurance claim in cases of sickness, accidents, unemployment and old age pensions should be extended to the entire social net. We demand a law regulating social insurance benefits on the federal scale with legitimate claims and minimum existential security.

We stand for individual old age provision for all members of society in order to prevent women’s old age poverty.

We stand for the integration of handicapped people, for their right to be heard and to participate in decisions at all levels; for complementing the rights of accident victims and handicapped people, at present based on causality, by providing country-wide nursing care oriented on actual healing requirements with sufficient financial means and services.

The right to claim the implementation of human rights cannot depend on citizenship. That is why the rights gap existing in Austria between citizens and migrants and immigrants must be abolished to establish political and social equality.

CHAPTER 4

For a New Culture of Living Together

Discrimination of women is not limited to the field of social production and the family; it is prevalent in all cultural, ideological, religious spheres. The term sexism stands for the entire gamut of prejudices against and humiliations and disadvantages of women. Just as racism does not comprise a characterization of light- and dark-skinned human beings but rather the creed of one’s own superior race , sexism is a manifestation of the desire to maintain the non-equality of the sexes.

Our culture, which has been dominant for thousands of years, has raised maleness to a universal principle that equates man and human being. The woman is the other one , the deviation from the norm, or she is identified with nature.

Officially women have no history. At best, they are mentioned at the margin or in footnotes. Male dominance is also reflected in the language: women usually do not appear, they are simply subordinated to male terms/designations. But priorities are also transmitted through speech and are closely linked to the socio-economic structure of society’s division of labour which classes occupations as important and unimportant. Important persons must be relieved of unimportant activities. Yet the latter are in fact such that without them nothing would work.

Sexism is a structural mark of our society, and aspects of violence against women are integrated into normal thinking and everyday comportment to such a degree that they go unnoticed. Patriarchal power and control exist also where women have completely accepted male dominance and do not question it.

Aggressions have muzzled women, made them incapable of speaking about the violence directed against them. To this day there exists a conglomerate consisting of: disregard for female achievements, inquisitorial treatment (e.g. of women who have been raped), sexist jokes, verbal oscenities (they also hurt the soul), sexual harassment at the workplace or in the street.

The Effect of Images

The patriarchal images of womanhood and the prevailing conceptions of manhood left their marks on both sexes. This lies at the root of the ambivalent attitude of many women regarding their intellectual capabilities, their body and their sexuality. The line followed in advertizing and by publicity in the media takes into account women’s manifold professional activities and better education. The central place is no longer occupied by the meek little housewife of the ‘fifties but by the ultra-slim, fashion-conscious, self-confident and obviously well-off woman consumer. And yet, this beauty ideal is also as unreal and equally removed from the daily life of most women as the former radiantly happy housewife. The effect is just as normative.

The dividing lines between publicity and pornography become increasingly blurred. It is not a question of taking position against the presentation of the nude body or of the sexual act, but rather against the degradation of women, a sign of which is the inflation of sensuousness and sexuality, the escalaton of prostitution and the propagated acceptance of the need to sell oneself: in the labour market or as a sexual object. Advertisements market a woman’s sexual charms as an unpaid extra to any purchase, and the message spread by pornography is: women want to be degraded, violated, tortured.

The cycle of demand and supply is bound to have a bearing on personal relations. Economic class reality and patriarchal structures are also noticeable in the personal and intimate spheres. The property mentality, fear of failure, the feeling of being on a test stand are props of capitalism and of the partriarchate, with the effect that the individual’s utilization value becomes the most important criterion of all, which leads to defensive mental attitudes. But active participation in political life and in the class struggle is based on an offensive mental attitude. In the spirit of Marxism, that means: to be fully aware of one’s own conditions of life, to develop one’ own individuality as a woman. It is important for women and men not to overlook the long term interests in human relationships between the sexes and the generations for the sake of short term advantages. For, to adjust means: participating in suppression and reproducing conditions under which the development of one gender depends on the relative lack of development of the other one.

For the Right to Self-Determination

From the moment she is born, a woman is exposed to different forms of violence - depending on her class situation, national origin, religious traditions and cultural environment. There is a connection between extreme physical violence and more subtle froms of mental and social violence. Rape or sexual abuse of children is also a method for a man to demonstrate his power over women. As can be gleaned from the martial pages of human history and as became evident recently in ex- Yugoslavia, rape is part and parcel of the male-patriarchic way of waging war - a power demonstration vis- -vis vanquished mother lands and their males, humiliated by the occupation of the female. Sexual morality - regardless whether attuned to abstinence, as in former times, or at present under the banner of libertarianism - is always an instrument used to control the population. Intentionally targeted sexual stimulation as part of the marketing strategy for all types of goods, which suggests to the buyer that he can indulge his own concupiscence thanks to this particular purchase, serves the interests of those who rule because it diverts the mind from the slow decline of democracy and is meant to compensate material insecurity and social coldness. In the same way, commercially utilized sexuality in its gender-specific form, serves the ruling class. Under such social conditions, women cannot even imagine what they could be. Alienated from their very essence, brought up to please others, many women also experience their sexuality as extraneously determined. Now at last, the present day women’s movement has mustered the courage to reject openly the man-made sexual rules of the game.

Nowadays, women - instead of adjusting - begin to assert their rights over their own bodies and to sexual fulfilment. In the course of discussions within the new women’s movement, the adaption of women’s needs to men’s imagined fantasies has begun to be questioned. With the discovery of their bodies taboos were broken, and women gained a new self-understanding. On the one hand, the liberalization of sexuality made it possible to speak more freely and openly about women’s needs; on the other hand, this progress also resulted in promoting new forms of sexism: massive marketing of female sexuality by the porno-industry. Men appreciate and enjoy the fact that women have desires, but it is they who determine - if needs be subtly - how these desires have to look.

Forced into such a straightjacket it is difficult to develop lustful utopias about self-assertive female sexual behaviour. This might help to understand why one sector of the women’s movement drew its conclusions from this and declared lesbian relations to be its political programme. Patriarchal patterns of thought probably exclude the very idea that women and not men can be the centre of a woman’s life. Ignorance with regard to lesbian love creates the feeling in many women with lesbian leanings that they are not normal . Supporting lesbian women in their struggle against discrimination and for the right to free choice of sexual preference also requires a self-analysis of one’s own comportment, modes of thought and sexual sensibilities.

Men and women need to come to grips consciously with their own sexual conditioning, created by patriarchal constraints. The consumer attitude promoted in our society disregards women’s identity, and at the same time it also blocks the evolution of differentiated male needs and autonomous female visions of eroticism. It devalues personal relationships and reduces sexuality to procreation and male lust. Sexuality is an important component of human communication. Economic, social, cultural, and political changes are needed to help it to unfold.

The Patriarchichal Procreation Folly

Patriarchate also signifies subjugation of the woman’s child-bearing role and control over the proliferation of the suppressed classes.

The idealistic attempt to emancipate mankind through early Christianity was turned into its opposite with the Constantine change. Together with the establishment of the institution of the official Church , the sinister alliance of Christianity’s sexuality-rejecting, anti-corporal attitude and a state-run population policy gradually came into being. Its aim was: a sufficiency of human material . Capital demanded sufficient labour power, and the state needed soldiers. The church-hierarchy ran the ideological conditioning of the population. Copulation was permitted only in wedlock and only with a view to procreate. The craving to watch closely over marriage dictates, to control sex life and to afflict sensuousness with sin and redemption was commensurate with patriarchal domination. It was heightened by the rule of celibacy which lies at the root of sexual neuroses and mysogenia. The outbreak of religious excesses (torture, burning of witches) which claimed millions of victims poisoned relations between men and women for generations.

Today, too, Catholic moral theology is dominated by patriarchic sexual morality which nevertheless gives rise to an ever-widening opposition within the Church. The official Church is extremely concerned about the fertilized ovum and mobilizes against sexual enlightenment and marriages without marriage licences, while the arms race and millions of deaths due to starvation leave it comparatively indifferent.

For the workers’s movement the interdiction of contraceptives and abortions was a question of class. In the 19th century, workers who used condoms were jailed while pessaries made of gold were traded in bourgeois circles. Right up to the ‘seventies of this century, most of the women who were cited before the Court because of an illicit abortion were women workers, kitchen maids or poor country girls.

Rightist conservative clerical circles have never accepted the termination of pregnancy, and in a period of change towards right wing conservatism, they are making a fresh start in their attacks against it. There are many examples of this in the US, but also in Austria. In the course of costly campaigns women are terrorized, and the termination of pregnancy is equated to murder. The more the foetus is raised to the rank of a juridical person, the less respect is paid to the woman as a subject. In this way, asserting her right over her own body comes under attack. A woman’s decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy for reasons of her own health or any other personal reason cannot be judged by others.

All forms of sexuality are marketed at a profit, and now we have arrived at a point when procreation, too, is to be commercially utilized: new procreation technologies (reproduction technologies) are being developed methodically with women serving as raw material suppliers. Doctors and technocrats dispose freely of women’s reproductive potentialities. Artificial insemination and fertilization in a test tube are of value to smart doctors and agencies and also a boon to ambitious scientists who use ovum and semen cells and embryos produced in test tubes for gene-technical experiments.

The possibilities of gene-technical interference in human germ cells and the propagation of genetical consultations and pre-natal diagnoses provide topicality for eugenics which had been assumed disavowed. But it is neither possible to improve the human race with the help of the semen of Nobel laureates nor to exclude handicaps through pre-natal diagnoses. (These can, for example, also be caused by faulty obstretics, for no more than four per cent of all handicaps are gene-conditioned.)

About the Upsurge of the Women’s Movement

In the early ‘seventies, the women’s movements manifested a dynamism whose objective roots lay in the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Many call this upsurge the new women’s movement as opposed to the women’s movement of the last century and the first half of this century. But this term conceals the fact that - despite the polarisation and massive wooing of women by political parties after 1945 - it was a democratic women’s movement, linked to the workers’ movement, that waged the struggle for the unity of women, demanding their rights. It was possible to gain improvements in the field of labour and social legislation, (e.g. maternity and family legislation, laws regulating work done at home and equal treatment of men and women). Today we are fighting against the whittling away of these rights. What was decidedly new in the new women’s movement was the commitment that has developed among women employees, women of the intermediate strata of the population. During the economic boom of the ‘sixties, the number of women in remunerative work rose considerably in the capitalist countries. At the same time, women penetrated into all spheres of education, gained qualifications, conquered new positions. Thanks to the development of new means of birth controi ( the pill ) in the ‘sixties, women acquired unprecedented possibilities to prevent unwanted pregnancies. A wave of sexual liberality - which some at first experienced as a revolution - did away with taboos (e.g. the virginity myth). In the upsurge of the anti-authoritarian students’ movements, women began to look at their situation critically and to manifest themselves politically.

The social changes enhanced the mental calibre of women: they became more demanding with regard to a meaningful way of life. The conventional images of the unselfishly happy housewife or the dumb sex bomb stood in glaring contrast to this reality. Women became aware of the extent to which they were discriminated in all social spheres and of the many possibilities of evolution that society had withheld from them.

Together We Are Strong

The women’s movements were kindled by unbearable discrepancies: on the one hand, the beautiful glitter of the consumer’s paradise and on the other hand the commonplace reality of exploitation and humiliation. Together we are strong was the slogan of the upsurge of the ‘seventies. Women demanded freedom and self-determination. They wanted everything: a job and love, children and political responsibility.

In 1974, the women’s movement in Austria rallied in protest against paragraph 144" (the legal prohibition of abortion) and for a woman’s right to self-determination and autonomy. The ‘eighties saw the establishment of political platforms for International Women’s Day (8 March), the organization of women’s summer universities. But there were also other areas of common political activities which served practical exchange of experience, women’s networking and theoretical discussion. The colourful picture of the Austrian women’s movement spanned from autonomous women’s groups, feminist women scientists, left wing Catholic/Christian women, women engaged in different women’s projects and women’s shelters, the lesbian movement to women’s peace groups, women’s committees of political parties and trade unions, women’s initiatives and professional groups, women’s cultural, communications and self-discovery groups and women of various democratic movements.

This climate of women’s revolt, motivated by the palpable fact of general suppresion of women, led women to take a common position of female victims of self-defence . Existing differences between women became immaterial. Only when in the’ eighties women had succeeded in conquering - at least rudimentarily - their feminist field of action in education and teaching, research, institutions or projects, the ideological confrontation - e.g. concerning the differences between women - grew in importance. Questions which surfaced were: which female reality of life deserved theoretical attention and what kind of strategy could end the suppression of women? How great is the importance of class, ethnicity, gender for the individual? Are relations between the sexes built within social constellations and can they, therefore, be undone culturally? And finally: is the cultural interpretation of the relations between the sexes just a mere chimera without any reality and, in fact, colonialist and ethnocentristic? More diversified theories engendered more diversified questions. Each one of these theories held out the promise of specialized professional careers and participatory power in the scientific establishment.

From Solidarity to Rivalry

The rivalry for professional access, advancement and recoginition led to competition among women and brought the dream of harmony and women’s solidarity up against harsh reality. Those women’s concerns that had advanced to state feminism and were dealt with in commissions for equal treatment, in women’s departments by ministers or civil servants responsible for women’s affairs, competed against autonomous women’s projects fighting for more financial resources, i.e. for survival.

Even before patriarchal structures were burst open, women had had to face a more difficult situation in the middle of the ‘eighties. Unemployment, intensified rivalry on the labour market, sexist strategies pursued by the media, the privatization policy and conservative family ideologies forced the women’s movement to fight on the defensive. Against the background of the economic crisis with its accompanying social marginalizations, its revived fear of social decline and its recrudescent biologisms but, above all, in a situation of public attacks against women’s solidarity, the time seemed to be ripe for anti-feminisms and the re-privatization of the topic of women . It was not the first time in history that the rivalries among women, their social differences and political rifts served to stabilize the patriarchal system. The law on the right to terminante a pregnancy , enforced after decades of struggle, is again becoming a target of increasing attacks by clerical and conservative forces. The differences between women’s life styles are given great prominence, and it is becoming more difficult to put what is common among them into the foreground. These days, women do not consider themselves only as victims, but also - within the range of what is possible - as persons actively involved: from complicity via conformity to the shrews, the innovative thinkers and revolutionaries.

Women at the End of the Twentieth Century

Women’s projects that had opened up new fields of activity and working methods for women find themselves in a constant struggle for survival in the search for market niches or state subsidies. Autonmous women’s projects slide into dependence on institutions. Women’s departments which, just a short time ago, were the emblem of democratic endeavour, are made to feel the domination of the organization set above them. Feminist research is penetrating established science and runs the danger of being trapped by it. Groups of women experts or professionals in the areas of culture, science or the arts risk slipping into the role of women lobbyists. And yet, being active in women’s groups and projects has changed the women themselves and sharpened their vision for democracy and self-determination. And it is not so easy to obliterate these experiences. New offensives, such as the Frauenvolksbegehren (a non-obligatory women’s initiative for improving the situation of women, held in 1997) prove that women are not willing to bow to patriarchal constraints nor to the capitalist offensive against their rights. Cooperation of women has acquired a new quality: it is rallying round socio-economic demands, calling for breaking up neo-liberal concepts.

Management, too, has discovered women - or rather their sensibility as a new management quality and is hoping that women in leading positions will provide new impulses for the modernization thrust. Women’s professional commitment is being canalized into management ideologies, and women afflicted by unemployment are advised to open up their own businesses, to be creative, to find market niches - regardless of the many bankruptcies and existing financial difficulties.

Women Marxists have to delve into the entire range of gender problems, their history and their significance today and to analyze them. The extent of this problem which left its marks on almost all fields of social politics is a clear indication of the narrowness with which the so-called women’s question has been viewed up to now. It is not possible to comprehend it as a subsidiary contradiction. With the change of capitalist conditions, this question does not disappear automatically . The struggle against the patriarchal structures of any given society has its own specific merit.

Feminism’s ultimate aim is to eliminate patriarchism which is inextricably linked to conditions of suppression in society, prevalent in all life spheres. At the same time, this would also signify a change in the balance of power in favour of women’s auto-determination and a democratization of society. Nevertheless, the controversy regarding the content and form of emancipation is by no means resolved. Attempts to present committed feminism as a quite harmless and random phenomenon and to blunt its orientations with a view to making them more palatable are the order of the day.

Our Orientations

A woman’s decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in the interest of her health or the evolution of her personality cannot possibly be evaluated by others. Her right to a free decision everywhere in Austria presupposes the commitment by all public hospitals to provide adequate out-patients departments and to guarantee that this intervention is carried out under the safest and gentlest conditions medically known.

We want the participation of all men and women, on a basis of equality, in social development. A society which does not restrict, marginalize and slander people for reasons of their gender, their social or ethnic origin can only be achieved through comprehensive democratization. So far, our daily struggle against a mighty mind-conditioning industry leaves us little space to expand our experiences into a complete picture of an alternative society. An exchange of experiences and ideas about possible future life styles offers a chance for shaping the future.

Courage to visualize a utopia means listening to our needs and not to subordinate them always and on every occasion to the objecive demands of a given situation. It means anticipating possible life styles, be it in the form of theoretical or practical experiments. And it also means developing and trying out - here and now - alternatives, working out concepts in the course of friendly dialogue with all those who stand for social change.

The humanization of relationships between people comprehends a new, completely different way of dealing with nature. There must be an end to the rapacious exploitation of natural resources, elimination and decimation of the multiplicity of species and to our dubious methods of repair; what is needed are the knowledge and capacity to treat existing resources economically. We have to learn to protect and preserve the natural cycles of the earth.

CHAPTER 5

Women’s Struggle in the Tense Atmosphere of Political Interests

The women’s movement has changed the lives of women and men. The firmness displayed by women in the struggle for their rights obliged all political trends to reassess their position regarding the so-called women’s question.

The Conservative Dilemma

The political parties also endeavour to take the women’s claims and demands into account in their own ways. This created a dilemma for the conservatives who had to react to the women’s increased needs, but without really encroaching on patriarchal society. To achieve this feat of art, they take recourse to family ideology. With a part-time jobs offensive and by rewarding work for the family (not so much in hard cash but by paying tribute to it ideologically in striving to to embed the concept of family in the Constitution), the conservatives aim at the cementation of the traditional role of the (house-)wife. The line of the bourgeoisie is to focus on partnership , while at the same time expecting above all the woman to be active in a very flexible way, in the first place in the family but besides this in remunerative work and also in voluntary work. Simultaneously, bourgeois women’s clubs endeavour to promote a woman elite. The continuous attacks by church organizations against the legal termination of pregnancies serve the real aims of conservative family policy: the indirect compulsion to bear children.

Reformist Politics

During the upsurge of the women’s movement it was possible to carry through important reforms (e.g. changes in family legislation, legal measures against violence). The greatest success was the so-called Fristenreglung (impunity for the terminaton of a pregnancy up to the end of the third month). But this policy remained a half-hearted affair, since many public hospitals do not implement it, and the question of costs has remained unsolved to this day. This inconsistent adoption of laws without regulations for their implementation has led to a situation in which, under capitalist conditions, the reforms and improvements - often achieved after long struggles - are in no way secured. This becomes quite evident when we look at the pressure exercized in order to make our laws EU-compatible: the elimination of the ban on night-work for women, the attempts to legalize work at weekends and on holidays or to do away with regulations governing social insurance legislation. Despite the constitutional guarantee to maintain the present women’s retirement age up to the year 2019 (equality with men only in 2033, when the discrimination of women should have come to an end), all kinds of tricks are being tried to raise the age of women’s eligibility for retirement. One idea is to punish women who have no children by postponing their access to retirement. Even rights that were regarded as absolutely self-understood are not only questioned by capitalism’s representatives but actually eliminated through concerted action.

The established Ministry for Women’s Affairs is exposed to continuus attack and is given a very small budget. Ministries that were initially organized by women were handed over to male claimants. What was new was the establishment of a Ministry for Family Affairs which conforms to neo-conservative concepts.

Quotas

The demand for quotes has made it very clear that, despite formal equality, women are in fact largely excluded from elected offices. In Parliament, the proportion of women deputies remained below ten per cent from the introduction of women’s voting rights to the year 1983. In 1997, this figure rose to about 25 per cent. In local and regional parliaments women’s representation is considerably lower. In the whole of Austria, there are only a negligible number of women mayors. Whereas women represent more than half the population, their concerns and the pressures and contraints that govern their lives constitute but a minority programme in political councils.

But if the demand for the introduction of women’s quotas in the spheres of education and jobs is not underpinned by a political job offensive, it can very easily be exploited by those who have always profited from splitting activities and from pitting one against the other. If men and women are competing against each other for work and training places it is the employers who win.

Women have participated actively in social controversies, have contributed a specifically female dimension and have developed their very own forms of political action. What is more, movements such as the ecological or the peace movement could not have gained weight without women. But also science and research have increasingly become areas of critical confrontation. Without the women’s movement, the subjects of gene- and reproduction technology would not have expanded so quickly nor so vehemently into problems of critical socio-political concern. Probing into the social compatibitity of these new technologies has only just begun, yet corporations, the pharmaceutical industry and a technological approach to medicine stand aloof and are pushing ahead with their development.

The Positions of the KPÖ

Reforms favourable to the majority of women are possible under capitalism. That is why communists, women and men, fight for socio-economic improvements. Beyond that, one has to see to it that legal measures and public pressure are brought to bear against sexism. We want to cooperate with all who also wish to bring about reforms and a changed awareness. In this struggle it is important for us, too, to show the limitations of the capitalist system.

These become visible with the following questions:

	how is the wealth of society distributed?
	who determines the utilization of the work force and the content of the work?
	who controls the natural resources?

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These basic tenets of democratic participation in decision-making show quite clearly:

	that the complete emancipation of women and the humanization of relations between the sexes threaten capital’s power and the very functioning of its mechanism;
	that patriarchal forms of culture and domination are inalienably linked to the capitalist system.

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On the basis of this understanding we demand that the women’s movement be accorded all possibilities for autonomous work. Women communists in the women’s movement and the trade unions are making great efforts to contribute to the networking of all activities undertaken by women and to organize women’s fora. We demand from administrations of all provinces and municipalities that they employ women, independent of parties, responsible for women’s affairs with a view to organizing discussion and exchange of experience among women on a systematic basis. Furthermore, we demand long-term financial guarantees for women’s projects and the expansion of accommodations for women’s activities.

Expectations and Reality

The upsurge of the autonomous women’s movement and the way it articulated itself made women communists re-examine critically their understanding of their own positions. In the course of coming to grips with the demands of autonomous women’s groups regarding women’s role in society, a learning process began which brought to light superficialities and biased positions in theory and practice followed so far. By going back to Marxist perceptions, it became evident that political evaluations and basic revolutionary orientations had been buried for decades.

When considering equality within a repressive system, it had been overlooked that patriarchal structures had made men privileged, yet at the same time they had also deformed them. This alienation manifests itself not only in the economic relationship of exploitation but also in the relationship between the sexes. The very deep contradictions do not fall solely into the category of class. That is why the category gender as a social, structural characteristic has to be incorporated in Marxist analyses. The thorough investigation of the dialectics of class and gender and its application in practice constitues a challenge for all communist parties. In the past, the KPÖ always placed great importance on joint activity of women and men, given its difficult struggle against prevailing power relationships. This community is the result of class solidarity and the socialist perspective. At the same time, it is necessary to be aware of the fact that social background, racism, sexism affect people belonging to the working class and to the Party in various ways. In the KPÖ, too, one comes across sexist comportment by comrades as well as traditional thinking and forms of violence marking the relations between women and men. There is a contradiction between the demand for emancipation, contained in the Party Programme and day-to-day activities. The new image that women have of themselves concerns men also and demands consequences from them, a certain follow-through regarding the image they have of themselves and regarding their comportment. A very open discussion of these problems requires the political culture of a productive exchange of opinions as well as an advancement of the organization by finding forms which would take into consideration people who live with children and are doing family work.

Marxism - Feminism

Feminine theorists have gone into nearly all facets of the relations between men and women. But descriptions which are not solidly based on a social theory remain superficial. All-round attacks against men in general, unspecific suspicions are understandable, but they are also directed against men who share the same aims and, last not least, such general attacks exonerate the patriarchate as a form of domination. For many women who regard themselves as feminists, feminism means fighting for women’s interests as women against male domination in all areas. Marxism, as a radical theory and practice, aims at overthrowing all social conditions in which women and men are exploited, humiliated, abandoned. The KPÖ rejects all notions and concepts which project the gender controversy as a black and white scheme and ignore social power structures, socio-economic developments and political forms of domination. Communists endeavour to uncover the class question within the gender relationships and to expose the gender relationships within the classes. Contrary to bourgeois family ideologies, the revolutionary workers’ movement understood that women’s remunerative work was the emancipatory prerequisite for women’s economic independence and social equality. Socialization of housework was supposed to counteract excessive work burdens on the working woman. This perspective, though in itself correct albeit simplistic, came up against expanding contradictory capitalist forms of organization: new work situations, the mass production of household appliances and articles for daily use did in fact alleviate some burdens; yet they could not relieve women of the responsibility for the entire field of reproductive work.

Marxist family theory failed to scrutinize the negative trends of the small family. Seclusion, isolation, continuity of traditional, gender-hierarchical division of labour again and again result in suppression. Demanding compatibility for women of job and family responsibilities as well as the recognition of motherhood as a contribution to society is in tune with today’s needs, but it leaves the patriarchal gender relations intact. Thus the subject of housework was more or less overlooked by Marxist social criticism in the second half of thi s century, and areas which are not penetrated by criticism are also impervious to changes.

Restructuring of the KPÖ, Its New Orientations

For a long time in history, there existed - apart from attitudes which were impervious to new social developments - also concepts that negated the possibility of the existence of an independent KPÖ. There were also other causes for a certain distance from reality and the standstill of communist parties: authoritarian and patriarchal structures, insufficient incorporation of women’s life styles and of their way of looking at things, suppression and blocking of conflicts and contradictions within the parties. By studying our history anew, we have learned that there is no such thing as automatism of historical development and that, therefore, there is no guarantee for us not to fail. This understanding is at the same time a chance for our renewal, a renewal that must inspire not only our party, given its contradictory past and its specific identity: it is also a chance for possible changes within the entire workers movement and the left.

The reform which the KPÖ is carrying out can only succeed if the anti-patriarchal orientation, embedded in its Declaration of Principles of 1994, is accepted at all levels. The demand that all leading bodies should have a proportion of 50 per cent women is written down in our statutes. Another demand is a periodic check on the implementation of this rule as well as on the conditions prevailng within the party structures for its implementation. In discussions, the principle of quotas or the zipper rule (man-woman-man-woman) have proved to be very effective. And yet it has not been possible to this day to bring about a feminization of our structures. By more or less shutting out the realities of women’s lives in substantive discussions within the party, we are faced with commensurate structures and rules of the game. Quite often, the only way is to adapt and accept the rules and norms. Moreover, it is a fact that it is difficult, even within female structures, to rid oneself of the prevalent concepts of politics. Nevertheless, the women’s movement has provided important impulses for a new kind of cooperation, which should give rise to critical discussions and evaluations.

Women’s Lobby

We need active womens’s lobbies, also within the KPÖ, positive mutual relations, an appreciation of women. We need an adequate education offensive. We must become creative, stop being merely reactive.

We are united by our conviction that the struggle for emancipation can best be waged in an organized way, that capacity to act politically develops on the basis of a revolutionary philosophy. The strength for political action does not arise solely from personal concerns but also from the desired capacity to analyze society and to work theoretically on perspectives. The confluence of the experiences of different generations, of divergent life situations and life histories is a merit of the KPÖ and facilitates comprehensive views of social conditions, which can lead to practical action. The KPÖ is a party of many active and courageous men and women who have played and are playing an invaluable part - often not sufficiently noted - in the anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and socio-economic struggle; of comrades who work with energy and creativity in alliances and action groups in trade unions, in the peace and women’s movements. The common political work and discussions make it possible to analyze changes, to gain a deeper understanding (in the spirit of the Communist Manifesto) and to act politically. Comradeship (which does not exclude differences of opinion) and new perceptions enrich also the personality of each single comrade.

To us, a socialist perspective means to think anew about the future: are economic use of raw materials and protection of nature possible without planning on a very wide, even global scale? Imperialist policy blocks the development of the vast majority of the world’s population and is at present subjecting the formerly socialist countries to capitalist utilization logic. That is why international solidarity and the evolution of a new kind of internationalism are essential for a socialist concept. This concept must also comprise the demands for creating gender relations worthy of the human race, in theory and practice.

Our Orientations

Marxist emancipation theory calls not just for equality and emancipation of the sexes, but for the transformation of a structurally patriarchic world, including its value system. This perspective demands the end of the systematic suppression of women and the elimination of male privileges. Overcoming the gender-hierarchic division of labour in the field of production and reproduction is an important prerequisite. And here the question of property in connection with democracy is a key question. Common property of the most important means of production does not signify that the contradictions between the sexes are solved. But a precondition would be that capital’s interest in a low evalutation of female labour not longer exists, thus making way for the conscious building of human relationships.

Such an orientation requires alternatives that would not unilaterally concentrate on the compatibility of job and nurturing/houshold work for women, but rather make this compatible for both sexes. This presupposes social measures capable of basically transforming the field of production and the private sphere, which means comprehensively democratizing both spheres. The demand for the introduction of quotas is indispensable for all-round structural transformations of production, reproduction and political culture. If the gender-relationship were to lead to transformations in the emancipatory sense of all social levels - the spheres of remunerative work, family, everyday life, politics - this would lead to upheavals in other areas. Such a development is by no means automatic, but it is a potential chance.

The gender emancipation calls for comprehensive transformations of objective and subjective structures of society and of the individual. Just as the class struggle requires autonomy, cultural counter-worlds, political and ideological counter-concepts and collective identity of the workers movement in confrontations with the establishment, the gender struggle, too, requires female space, female identity, independence, partiality, and autonomy. That would have an effect on male privileges. Without the political struggle against male privileges, without the collective but also the individual struggle of every single woman, women will not attain the status of subjects.

What we do not demand and fight for will not be achieved.

(adopted by the 30th Congress of Communist Party of Austria, October 1997)

Distributed by Communist Party of Austria, Women’s Department. Address: Weyringergasse 33, 1040 Wien, Austria. Telephone: +431/5036580, Fax: +431/5036580-499. E-mail: [email protected]

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