Clara Fraser

Clara Fraser (March 12, 1923 – February 24, 1998) was a feminist and socialist political organizer, who co-founded and led the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women.

Clara Fraser
Born(1923-03-12)March 12, 1923
East Los Angeles, California
DiedFebruary 24, 1998(1998-02-24) (aged 74)
OrganizationRadical Women
Political partyFreedom Socialist Party

Biography

Early life

Clara Fraser was born to Jewish immigrant parents in multi-ethnic, working class East Los Angeles. Her father, Samuel Goodman, was a Teamster. Her mother, Emma Goodman, was a garment worker and later a Business Agent of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.[1] Fraser joined the Socialist Party's youth group in junior high school.

By 1945, after graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in literature and education, Fraser was a recruit to the ideas of Leon Trotsky, whose campaign against Stalinism had gained adherents worldwide. She joined the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) that year. In 1946, she moved to the Pacific Northwest to help build the SWP's Seattle branch.

As an assembly line electrician, Fraser joined the Boeing Strike of 1948. When the union was slapped with an anti-picketing injunction, she put together a mothers' brigade to walk the line with baby strollers. After the strike, Boeing fired and blacklisted Fraser, and the FBI pursued her for a decade.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Fraser stayed active in the labor arena, worked to end segregation, advocated for women, and opposed the Vietnam War. She worked with her then-husband, Richard S. Fraser, in developing Revolutionary Integration, which explains the interdependence of the struggles for socialism and African American freedom and argues the key importance of black leadership to the U.S. working class.[2]

The SWP, however, was supporting the Nation of Islam. The Seattle local conducted a long campaign to try to win the national party to its perspective. A clampdown on internal party democracy brought this effort to a dead end. Fraser co-authored the branch's critique of the SWP's political and organizational degeneration in a series of documents that have been re-published under the title Crisis and Leadership (Seattle: Red Letter Press, 2000).

Socialist feminist leadership

The Seattle branch left the SWP in 1966 and launched the Freedom Socialist Party, founded on a program emphasizing the leadership role of the underprivileged in achieving progress for all of humanity.

In 1967, Fraser formed Radical Women (RW), along with Gloria Martin and young women of the New Left. RW's ambition was to teach women leadership and theoretical skills and class consciousness.

In 1973, Fraser began work at Seattle City Light, a publicly owned utility. As Training and Education Coordinator, she was charged with implementing a program to hire and train female electrical workers.

Fired in 1974, Fraser immediately filed a discrimination complaint that documented pervasive political bias and sexism. After a seven-year battle, Fraser was victorious in a ruling that affirmed the right of workers to speak out against management and to organize on their own behalf. She returned to her former job at City Light just as a new furor broke out over discrimination against women in non-traditional trades. Fraser joined with women in the field and the offices and pro-affirmative action men to form a new organization to combat sex and race discrimination: the Employee Committee for Equal Rights at City Light (CERCL).

In 1984, an ex-FSP member named Richard Snedigar brought a harassment lawsuit against Fraser, seven other party leaders, and the organization as a whole. This case came to be known as the Freeway Hall Case.

Snedigar wanted to take back a substantial donation given years before to a fund for obtaining a new headquarters after the party was evicted from its homebase at Freeway Hall. He also demanded FSP minutes, membership lists, and names of contributors. At one point, Fraser and the party's attorneys were sentenced to jail for refusing to divulge financial information, but their sentences were stayed and ultimately overturned. The FSP pursued this case to the state Supreme Court, where civil liberties attorney Leonard Boudin argued that privacy rights are essential to the freedom to express dissent. The FSP was finally vindicated in 1992.

Clara Fraser had two sons.

Philosophy and political thought

Clara Fraser had emphasized that a feminism focused only on feminism would be insufficient, and thought that ultimately, it wouldn't realize its own goals. As she said, "the logic of feminism is to expand inexorably into a more generalized radicalism." The oppression of different sexes, classes, and so on all depend upon each other, and so, focusing on any single issue would be a detriment to the others. In the case of feminism, "single-issue feminism" would inevitably be dominated by white, upper-class women, who would think that they're representing all women. There are many quotes throughout her writing that express this view:[3]

"The single- issue is the dead-end issue. It always ends up smack against the wall. True, it is large, but it is also, invariably, diffuse, ambiguous, contradictory, deceptive and mercurial... It moves to the right, not to the left, and it moves radicals along with it."[3]

"Without [socialist feminist] leadership, the women's movement, like every other movement, will petrify, corrode, adapt and drown inside the Democratic Party or inane, single-issue liberalism. Or it will adopt an ultra-left, insanely sectarian and/or terroristic stance, born of desperation and bitterness."[3]

Clara Fraser expresses many of her views in her book Revolution, She Wrote. In her paper "How Marxists Think", she expresses a disdain for classical logic. In her summary of Aristotle, Aristotle had contributed three laws to formal logic:

  1. "A" equals A: the law of identity. A thing is always equal to itself.
  2. "A" cannot be non-A: the law of contradiction.
  3. "A" cannot be both A and non-A: the law of the excluded.

Fraser cites five critiques of these laws:

  1. These laws are only true if one assumes the world is something fixed and unchanged. Nothing moves and develops, because motion implies self-contradiction. As she says, "Does a dollar always equal a dollar? Hardly."
  2. Formal logic creates impassable barriers between things, but in reality, everything grows out of and into other things: paper into money, and money into paper again; rivers into seas and seas into clouds; bacteria into animals and animals into humans.
  3. A can equal not a; formal logic has too rigid a view of identity. The working class for example, is a heterogenous and contradictory mass. In her words, "a worker is not a boss, but can think and act like one."
  4. These laws present themselves as absolute, final, and eternal. But in reality, everything is relative, inter-dependent and changing, and as a consequence, so are the laws of governing them.
  5. The laws of formal logic cannot explain themselves; they cannot account for their own origin or cause of being.

This is where Hegel and Marx come in for Fraser. Fraser states that Hegel had realized these flaws and developed a logic which had taken motion and change into account, but was still plagued by a kind of idealism, a privileging of non-material substances (such as the Absolute Spirit) over material conditions. This is where Marx "fixes" Hegel, seeing changing rooted in the natural conditions of a society. Fraser states that all science is the study of the motion and behavior that matter, and Marxism is simply the study of human motion and social behavior.[3]

References
  1. "Activist Clara Fraser Dead At 74 -- `Life Spent Contemplating Your Own Navel . . . Helps No One.' | The Seattle Times". archive.seattletimes.com. Retrieved 2020-12-18.
  2. http://www.redletterpress.org Revolutionary Integration: A Marxist Analysis of African American Liberation
  3. Fraser, Clara (1998). Revolution, She Wrote. 409 Maryland Avenue South, Suite 201 Seattle, WA 98104: Red Letter Press.CS1 maint: location (link)

Further reading

Articles and interviews

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