On the Proletarian Feminist Organization
The Proletarian Feminist Organization (PFO) was established in July 2022, initially as an exploratory committee connecting cadre within a cell of the RSCO to an outside contact who had provided us with a dossier of research on the Pregnancy Choices Center (PCC). This was largely conducted on the basis of our conclusions in the theoretical positions outlined above: that the construction of a formation to organize the spontaneous struggle of women was necessary to intervene against the proliferation of fundamentally bourgeois ideas in the mass women’s movement, and that we could best do so by channeling mass energy in the direction of a concrete class enemy (which we understood the PCC to represent).
The PCC is part of a group of "clinics" and media hubs which are referred to as Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) - these entities operate with the express aim of discouraging women from seeking abortion and organizing to roll-back reproductive rights. Crisis Pregnancy Centers pursue this objective by posing as "clinics," leveraging search optimization to appear high on search engine results when searching for terms like "abortion" or "pregnancy," often going so far as to locate themselves geographically near to actual reproductive care providers in order to confuse and trick women. Once ensnared, staff of the CPCs work to isolate their victims, bombarding them with propaganda while shaming them for seeking abortion, cloaking their anti-women talking points as "options counseling."
These organizations are directly linked to the "mainstream" far-right, principally via umbrella groups such as CareNet (of which the PCC is a member organization) which serve as donor networks to establish lines of funding and secure logistical and organizational relationships between groups advancing "conservative" political projects, from the abortion rights rollback to the attack on LGBT protections (as well as other basic democratic rights for women and other gender oppressed people).
The possibility for developing a campaign against the PCC was separately raised several months earlier during research for a planned, then aborted, march in response to the leaked draft decision regarding the Roe v. Wade overturning earlier that year, originally in the context of RSCO work within our local antifascist coalition. At that time, the plan had been to call a mass demonstration which would march to the PCC, at which point a smaller group of militants would emerge "spontaneously" from the demonstration and attempt to directly disrupt the center's operations. External factors (and no small amount of struggle over political line within the coalition, particularly around the relative strategic value of such an escalation compared to the serious risk which it would pose) lead to the demonstration being delayed and then liquidated. While we remained interested in the potential for initiating a proletarian feminist campaign over the course of a concrete struggle against the PCC, we elected to temporarily set it aside.
Conditions changed in late June / early July, as the formal announcement of the Roe v. Wade overturning renewed the mass mobilizations of women and gender-oppressed people which had erupted and then subsided in the spring. At this point, one of our intermediate contacts, with whom we work in the antifascist coalition, approached us with research he had carried out on the membership and organizational composition of the PCC.
His research was thorough and well-organized, including extensive documentation about the individual organizers who held leadership positions within the PCC. But we took particular note of details regarding the landlord of the clinic, determining it would be fruitful to initiate a campaign under the auspices of our own tenant- and labor-organizing work, which could target the landlord and demand he evict the PCC. To our view, that link is the main weak point within the PCC's organizational apparatus, since there is little evidence indicating the landlord is ideologically committed to their project. Our position at the time was that pressuring him directly would be the clearest path to dislocating the PCC from their current offices, which would constitute a massive disruption of their activity; secondarily, this campaign would allow us to link up the "economic" class struggle work within which we are already embedded with the proletarian feminist movement, offering a concrete site for struggle against a tangible set of enemies
We consequently made the decision to move forward with organizational construction, bringing in a handful of activist contacts to initiate our campaign. We called for a demonstration outside of the offices of the landlord (next-door to the PCC), initially making the erroneous decision to schedule it for a time during which the PCC itself would be closed, with the hope that organizing a weekend demonstration would turn out more numbers. Criticism from some allied organizations drove us to reschedule in order to ensure that the clinic would be open during the demonstration itself, allowing us to engage in direct disruption of their day-to-day operations in addition to our primary goal of pressuring the landlord. This was bolstered by a social media “doxxing” blitz, exposing the opportunists and fascists in leadership positions at the PCC and calling on the masses to participate in our demonstration.
With the exception of the initial demonstration outside of the PCC and the related social media “doxxing” campaign against its board our mass work during this period was limited to attending events held by other groups which we determined to be of relevance to the women’s struggle. During those events, our cadres would canvas attendees and attempt to develop contacts among the advanced and intermediate elements present in the struggle. This resulted in only marginal gains: we managed to draw a handful of activists into our committee, but not consolidate them. Among the contacts we made during this period were an existing, informal network of tenants and local residents in the residential apartments above the PCC, and our failure to further develop those contacts was a major defeat: this network had been engaged in low-intensity resistance to the PCC since it first moved into the building, and their fighting spirit was redoubled by our campaign (the first outside support they’d received in years).
Despite their willingness to fight, however, we remained unsystematic in our approach to them, engaging in informal relationship building and occasional phone-calls but rarely making concrete asks (ie, to help flyer or sticker, even though they lived immediately above the campaign’s target).
Our inability to mobilize these mass elements for organizing work—that is, to do more than get them to turn out to demonstrations or sign a petition—was the product of a number of contradictions stemming, ultimately, from one primary error: our frantic pace of work, rooted in a desire to seize on the political moment.
In this case, the consequence was that, by prioritizing “the work” of advancing the struggle, we fell into situations of prioritizing that that work itself was done, rather than using the same energy to mobilize mass contacts to help carry it out. So doing meant that tasks were accomplished, but our contacts were not “learning by doing,” and we were unable to consolidate them. We might characterize this as a sort of economism in miniature: prioritizing the completion of immediate tasks for the campaign over what should have been our primary goal of developing mass contacts into dedicated class combatants resulted not only in the collapse of the campaign itself, but also, ultimately, the loss of many of those contacts!
By way of example, we point to the period of escalation immediately before our demonstration outside the PCC, which involved the composition and propagation of a public demand letter to the landlord.
We began that work by collecting and synthesizing the particular demands (expressed both spontaneously and after exposure to our agitation and propaganda) which our contacts were willing to make of the landlord, which we were able to conduct more or less successfully. We then intended to collaboratively write the letter with our contacts, in order to link those demands with a proletarian feminist political line.
This co-writing effort was a failure: our hastiness and improper orientation, emphasizing the needs of the campaign over our political goal of generating new communists, required that the document to be complete prior to our public rally. We prioritized simply “getting the task done,” and failed to patiently work with our mass contacts to compose a document which legitimately reflected a mass proletarian feminist politics, a process which would’ve demanded thorough political education and persuasion.
Instead, in order to avoid alienating our contacts, we consistently ceded some positions on which we should've been more firm, diluting the line to a “mass” level that was in fact tailist. This mistrust in the masses, who may well have been more sympathetic to a more robustly revolutionary political line, resulted in our adopting unscientific slogans (such as calling upon a landlord to "serve the people").
Despite this, we also continued to employ agitational materials and adopt slogans which were often more explicitly ideological or of a higher political level than would’ve been appropriate for a mass campaign. This persistent confusion of mass and advanced politics stunted our ability to either meaningfully intensify the particular struggle we had set out to organize, or to unite with the advanced elements already engaged in the spontaneous women’s movement going on all around us.
Indeed, where the work of the PFO has been generative, it has not been in attempting to independently organize a campaign around the PCC, but instead, in our insertion into the spontaneous struggle which was ignited by the Roe versus Wade decision’s repeal, particularly on the terrain of the labor movement, where we further consolidated links with advanced contacts in the educators’ unions, although this brought our committee into consistent conflict with Trotskyite elements. In particular, wreckers from the International Socialist Group—a continuator section of the CWI-CIT, from which the International Socialist Alternative split in 2019—were a constant thorn in our side during this period, ardently resisting any attempt to raise the political level of our coalition, which was organized under the slogan “worker power for abortion rights!”
This committee was composed of workers from one of two of the statewide educator unions operating in the area, many of whom had recent experience in strike organizing, or were in the midst of contentious contract campaigns during the course of the coalition’s work. We joined the coalition as it was in the process of forming, and attempted throughout to give it strategic direction—at the time, it had no orientation beyond calling mass demonstrations under its slogan, which, it became clear, were little more than a facade for the recruitment efforts of the ISG—by linking it up with our campaign against the PCC. There was some initial interest in this direction, and we did manage to win several other workers to our position, that the coalition should take the lead in a concrete struggle against a concrete class enemy, but the ISG immediately went to work countering this line, ultimately isolating us from the majority of the coalition by circumventing our existing lines of communication to engage in red-baiting and accuse us of “Stalinism” to other workers in back-channels. We were, finally, forced from the coalition a few months after it formed, and it rapidly collapsed afterwards. Nevertheless, our contacts from this period remained, and our participation in coalition events also served to link us up with militant workers from the Starbucks Workers organizing movement, and further consolidate our relationship with communist militants emerging from the collapse of a different national party-building project who ultimately merged into the RSCO.
In another example of relative success intervening in the spontaneous struggle, a few weeks after our initial demonstration outside of the PCC, we briefly diverged from our strategy of mass campaigning and organized an antifascist counterdemonstration opposing a "Cassock March" of conservative Catholics against abortion rights which was timed to coincide with a "Pray-In" organized by the PCC being held in a downtown park. Heavy police presence and sluggish deployment precluded us from directly confronting the reactionary march or intercepting it before it reached its destination, so our opposition was eventually reduced to a relatively run-of-the-mill noise demonstration.
After the reactionary demo dispersed, we rallied our crowd and marched to the location of the pray-in event, hoping to occupy it and prevent them from assembling. It quickly became clear that they would not attempt to hold their event at all—they had already retracted all public references to the “pray-in” from their social media pages as soon as our counterdemonstration was announced, although it remained on their website and in their newsletter. We celebrated this as a victory, that they had caved to the mere threat of opposition, and decided to hold an impromptu march from there to the PCC itself (which was nearby), seizing and blocking the city streets. We then concluded with a brief speaking program and chanting, and then dispersed our crowd.
All-sidedly, we would describe the action as a moderate success, roughly 70% good, 30% bad. While the major objectives were only partially achieved, we managed to carry out considerable mass work during the action, link up with militant and advanced elements, and expand the reach of the PFO; furthermore, we developed our relationship with the communist militants mentioned above. The limited success we faced in directly confronting the fascists was to be expected, though we could and should have been able to mobilize earlier than we did, which may have altered the course of events (even if direct confrontation was still closed off by the significant police presence). Preparing for such direct confrontations—commando-style lightning responses to reactionary action (coupled with a continued emphasis mass antifascist organizing)—depends on the continued development of our politico-military capacity, a task which we can accomplish only by uniting with other advanced elements to broaden our pool of trained and disciplined cadres. Consequently, the secondary successes we saw during that action should be understood as contributing to precisely that, even if the confrontation itself remained at a less than desirable stage.
We conclude with a final observation regarding our initial hypothesis that the PCC constituted a “concrete class enemy.” While it is true that the PCC, and all crisis pregnancy centers, are enemies of working class women, and there did exist a (small) spontaneous opposition to the PCC’s presence in the city—in the form of the informal tenant network mentioned above—the lack of a mass resistance to the clinic (and, more fundamentally, a mass consciousness about its reactionary role) left us in the position of attempting to artificially inflame the struggle and draw in mass participation. Considering the actually existing mass mobilization of women against the Roe versus Wade repeal, it is clear that the objective conditions for such a process were certainly in place; it was the subjective conditions which were not. Had we focused on working with and developing the existing network of opposition, rather than attempting to build an independent organization, we may well have seen more success in then drawing in more outside support.
And, as above, the outcome of this sequence reflected the ambiguity of our general strategic orientation towards the PFO and its work: this lack of clarity resulted in the overall failure of this particular sequence, and it is no coincidence that we have consequently placed the project on hiatus pending a clarification of our tactical approach.