International Socialists

Tess Lee Ack from Socialist Alternative in Australia argues that one of Marxism's most important contributions - its analysis of women's oppression - has gone largely unrecognised.

 

 

In a poll conducted on the BBC website last year, Karl Marx was voted "thinker of the millennium." We agree. It was, after all, Marx who uncovered the workings of human history, who provided the most thorough critique of capitalism and who identified the working class as the force which could create a new, classless society.

 

But one of Marxism's major contributions to the fight for human liberation usually goes unrecognised: its analysis of women's oppression.

 

The ideas of Marx and Friedrich Engels on the "woman question" were published in Engels' The origins of the family, private property and the state, which provided the first  - and still unrivalled - theoretical framework for understanding women's oppression in capitalist society.

 

Unlike the Utopian Socialists who preceded them (or feminists then and now), Marx and Engels located women's oppression firmly in the real, material conditions of society, and not in "human nature" or the ideas in people's heads.

 

Women's liberation, like human liberation generally, could only be achieved through practical action to change social structures, not simply by "educating" people to behave better.

 

Marx and Engels argued that women's oppression was a product of class society and the development of private property. In pre-class societies, the absence of a surplus and the need to survive imposed a certain egalitarianism (what Marx and Engels called "primitive communism").

 

However, once ownership and inheritance of property became an issue, the "mother right" (tracing descent through the mother) was overthrown. Engels called this, "the world historical defeat of the female sex," when "the man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of his children."

 

Thus class society gave rise to two key aspects of women's oppression: economic inequality, and the sexual double standard which condemned women to monogamy or celibacy.

 

Class society also meant that not all women had common interests. Like men, they were divided along class lines, with a minority (of both sexes) at the top benefiting from the exploitation and oppression of the vast majority (of both sexes) below.

 

Different class societies (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) have produced different types of family, moulded to suit the needs of the ruling class. In the early years of capitalism, when women and children provided much of the labour in the new factories, it seemed that the working class family would die out.

 

But the more farsighted capitalists realised that premature deaths and high infant mortality rates among the working class threatened their profits in the longer term. Moreover, it wasn't just a question of reproducing the next generation of workers, they also needed to be reasonably healthy and disciplined to accept their subordinate role in society and the rule of the bosses.

 

The solution? Privatise the reproduction of the workforce in the home and make the women do the work for free - and sell this unpaid labour to them as their "natural" and major role in life. The "natural" order of the modern nuclear family led to rigid stereotypes of "appropriate" behaviour for women and men, including sexual behaviour.

 

This is why Marx and Engels, as early as The Communist Manifesto (1848), called for "the abolition of the family." Along with abolition of all private property, this was the precondition to ending women's status as mere "instruments of production."

 

Of course, women have always remained in the workforce. But establishing the idea of women's main role as wife and mother had other benefits for the capitalists: women became a "cheap" section of the workforce, and this acted to drag down wages and conditions for the whole working class.

 

This in turn creates divisions and segmentation within the working class and acts as a barrier to the unity that is essential if workers are to successfully resist and overthrow the ruling class.

 

Marx and Engels welcomed the participation of women in the workforce alongside men and insisted that they should be organised as an integral part of the workers' movement.

 

Only then could women fight alongside men on an equal basis and achieve their own emancipation. Liberation, by definition, cannot be handed down - it must be won. As Marx famously said, "The emancipation of the working classes can only be conquered by the working classes themselves." The same applies to women.

 

Women and men, united in struggle against a common class enemy, can overcome sexist ideas. This is evident every time workers challenge capitalist rule, whether on the smaller scale of a strike or at the heights of a revolution.

 

The Russian Revolution of October 1917 introduced rights for women then unheard of in the rest of the world (and in total unmatched even today). Not just the right to vote, but equal pay, equal opportunity in jobs and education, free abortion and contraception, free maternity care, paid maternity leave and free childcare, easy civil marriage and divorce and so on.

 

Marxism's great achievement was to recognise that sexist ideas flow from women's position in class society. So only by getting rid of the material basis of their oppression - their unpaid labour in the home and consequent economic inequality - can women become truly free.

 

The Russian revolution made a start. But tragically Russia was too poor and economically backward to complete the project of socialising housework and childcare. In the 1920s came Stalin's counter revolution when women, and the working class generally, lost these improvements.

 

The upsurge of class struggle in the 1960s and 70s also saw the birth of movements against oppression and a series of struggles against sexism, racism and homophobia. Out of these struggles, great gains were made, at least in the more advanced industrial societies. Young women of today have far more rights and opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers.

 

But we are still far from being liberated. And many of the gains are enjoyed only by a minority of women. Many feminists today have essentially given up on liberation, aspiring only to equal rights with men within the framework of an exploitative capitalist society. For working class women, that doesn't offer much.

 

Marxism, ultimately, is about human liberation. It's about the fundamental transformation of every aspect of society, not about winning a few reforms that benefit a minority. And that's why anyone who wants to fight for women's liberation should be a Marxist.