Clara Fraser

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

Biography

Early life and activism Clara Fraser was born in 1923 to Jewish immigrant parents in multi-ethnic, working class East Los Angeles. Her father, Samuel Goodman, was a Teamster and anarchist. Her mother, Emma Goodman, was a garment worker and later a Business Agent of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. 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. Fraser moved to Chicago and participated in a union drive at a department store. In 1946, she moved to the Pacific Northwest to help build the SWP's Seattle branch.

Within the SWP, Fraser opposed the party's support for the Nation of Islam. The Seattle local conducted a long campaign to try to win the national party to its perspective, but 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).

The Seattle branch left the SWP in 1966 and launched the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP), 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, theoretical skills, class consciousness.

Seattle City Light Career and Discrimination Lawsuits After being fired by Boeing and blacklisted as a communist by the FBI, Fraser struggled to find stable employment. Fraser took a job as a receptionist in a psychologist's office, where her communist affiliations were accepted, and worked there for seven years.

As a recruiter for the ETT program, Fraser used her connections and targeted the feminist community, resulting in over 400 women applying for the ten open positions. and a paper trail of memos revealed increased micro-management from Vickery and her superiors. Fraser was laid off without notice in July 1975, officially due to budget cuts, but the move was largely seen as an act of retaliation. In September 1975, the ETT program was terminated, and all but two of the trainees were laid off. Originally, Fraser was refused unemployment benefits and ordered to pay back severance fees she had already received. These charges were dropped. however, after Fraser protested publicly. In June 1976, the training and education coordinator position that Fraser had occupied was refilled by a man who had less experience.

"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."

"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."

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

Fraser cites five critiques of these laws: 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." 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. 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." 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. 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 change 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.