, the need for unity, for involving as wide a layer of workers as possible to gain the strength to defeat governments and employers opens the way for old prejudices to be smashed. That is one important reason for socialists to be organised, and to have ideas about how to win the necessary arguments. Because it is often the intervention of socialists into spontaneous struggles that encourages these steps to be taken. If they are not taken, nine times out of ten the struggle will fail because of its own divisions.
It is not accidental that surveys have shown that skilled male workers often have the most progressive ideas about women's rights - even than most women. Because they are the section of the working class often with the highest levels of unionisation, they learn the lessons of unity.
So the socialist answer to sexism is struggle . And fundamentally, to end capitalism, struggle led by the working class who have the power to stop production and therefore the capitalist system. In the first two years of the twenty first century, the anti-capitalist movement has taken off around the world marked by mass mobilisations against bodies such as the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and the World Bank, or gatherings of heads of governments. This movement has its own features and dynamic. The tens of thousands who turn out to the mass mobilisations obviously take heart from the fact that lots of different struggles come together at them, that all kinds of issues can be raised, discussed and protested about. Anger over sweatshop conditions has raised a pertinent women's issue. In this climate, the defensiveness of В«autonomousВ» women's organisations is completely out of step with events. The mass protests should be the focus of everyone who wants to fight sexism, and for women's liberation. In Porto Alegre at a mass mobilisation against the World Economic Forum, unity between the 15-20,000 who protested on the streets illustrated the potential for this new movement. The issues raised included (apart from economic demands to deal with poverty) opposition to US backing for corrupt military dictators in Latin America, support for abortion rights, and a drag queen led a contingent calling for Lesbian and Gay rights. At the May 1 protest in Melbourne in 2001, socialists were able to involve marchers in chanting slogans about issues from Third World debt, to union rights, to Queer liberation. Tens of thousands of women join with equal numbers of men at each and every one of these mass protests, laying the basis for a movement which can fundamentally challenge the very basis of women's oppression. And that is the existence of class society itself. For that, we need a movement centred on the working class.
For only with the end to the underlying class divisions which make sexism necessary and useful to the system will women's liberation be possible.
