On 10/14/06, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > So, women are allowed to become heads of bad capitalist states and > parties but not of good socialist states and parties?The passive voice here perhaps helps identify what we need to locate. Who or what allows or doesn't allow? Corporations were forced by the womens movement to place women in the leadership _pool_ (the lower ranks of management and professional positions) and then the operations of capitalist individualism ("merit" procedures) guaranteed that a certain number of them would filter to the top.)
Leadership selection procedures of socialist and social democratic parties and states have seldom been very clear. I'm afraid that the myth of egalitarianism works against women in formations on the Left. Leftists say we are all equal, masses are better than leaders, it doesn't matter who the leaders are, etc. It all sounds nice, but it just ain't true. Part of what needs to be done is to make leadership a political problem requiring serious thought (eschewing usual meaningless complaints of "betrayals," etc.).
But I want to focus just on the "parties," not states, for state leadership is a question of the future. And actually, on mostly on local left organizations, for I can't take very seriously any of the organizations presently pretending to be "national" or even regional in scope. Are there organizational or theoretical moves we can make that will create a leadership pool sufficiently 'loaded' with women to significantly shape any future national movement? (This is a maillist, so we are willy-nilly confined to theory in abstraction from any shared practice.)
I was reading Melvin's posting and thinking about situations I know firsthand as well as those I read about. It seems to me that leadership pools at low to intermediate levels are often loaded with women and in some contexts pools just below the very top are often loaded with women, too (outside mailing lists!). A while ago I read an interesting article on the "stained glass ceiling" in the NYT. I'll try to locate it as it says something interesting about women's leadership. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
