Tcahr Issue 40

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   "To aid in the incubation, breeding, and release of butterflies in Asia." 
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 Vol. 02, Iss. 16                                            Marxism and Women 
                                                                        by BMC 
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Since its conception, the cause of socialism has been to free the proletariat 
from the rule of the capitalist bourgeoisie.  This freedom is to be attained by 
eliminating unfair working conditions and low wages, transferring the means of 
production from being privately owned to being communally owned, and 
eliminating the class structure.  In short, the goal of socialism is to bring 
about complete equality between people of all demographics.  However, it 
remains uncertain whether this cause has been a sufficient advocate of women’s 
rights.  While The Communist Manifesto has little to say about the involvement 
of women in the proletarian revolution, Lenin’s writings address this in 
greater detail.  Throughout this essay, I will explore the privileges and 
conditions offered to women by socialist philosophers to the end of determining 
whether or not socialist policy sufficiently meets the needs of working women 
of the world. 

When one talks about the work of women in a modern context, it is almost 
certain that issues of domestic labour and child rearing will be brought up. 
Conversely, discussion about men’s work does not usually involve mention of 
men’s responsibility to the home and family.  This is because the process of 
industrialization has served to allocate men and women to separate spheres, men 
to the factory, and women to the home.  While the labour of men has been 
exploited to produce goods for the marketplace, the labour of women has been 
used to feed and refresh the factory workers and bear children who will be the 
producers and reproducers of the future generation.  The problem with this that 
it allows a chain of exploitation to be made; the bourgeoisie exploits the male 
industrial proletariat, and the male proletariat exploits the female domestic 
proletariat.  This turns the female into a subclass of the male, making the 
female proletariat the most exploited member of an industrial society. 

V.I. Lenin suggests that the socialist state should include "Full equality for 
citizens, irrespective of sex, religion, or race", but socialism is often 
criticized for being too broad of an ideology.  While it is assumed that 
socialism takes the needs of all groups into account – sex, sexuality, 
language, skin colour, ability, etc., its ideology might be so wide-reaching 
that it tends to pay insufficient attention to people of certain demographics. 
Many feminists believe that, as socialism focuses so strongly on labour 
issues, that the attention paid to issues of sexual equality is not strong 
enough.  In Sexual Equality & Socialism, Anne Phillips says that socialists 
have "tended to play the class card to trump and excessive preoccupation with 
sexual equality". 

In The Communist Manifesto, Phillips’ notions are confirmed by the fact that 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels seem more interested in making the industrial 
proletariat autonomous at the expense of capitalism than they are in making the 
domestic proletariat autonomous at the expense of patriarchy.  They are so much 
more interested in the former, in fact, that they do not give a great deal of 
consideration to the latter, except to ensure that the family unit will be 
abolished under a socialist system.  Marx and Engels accuse the bourgeois 
family unit of being based on capital and private gain.  Capital and private 
gain are the chief enemies of socialism, and, for this reason, Marx and Engels 
seek to eliminate the family structure and replace it with new social 
structures.  Under their plan, the wife would not be viewed as "a mere 
instrument of production," as the bourgeois view "the wives and daughters of 
their proletarians… not to speak of common prostitutes… [and] each other’s 
wives" – unless, of course, it is "openly-legalized".  Here The Communist 
Manifesto nicely sets up future socialist proposals that will advocate an end 
to the nuclear family, and promote what Lenin calls "The Emancipation of 
Women." 

Lenin wrote many documents on women’s rights in the capitalist society and how 
they could be improved through the implementation of socialism.  He suggested 
that women’s attachment to domestic labour was a detriment to women in a 
capitalist society, since the work could not be exchanged in the marketplace. 
So, as Lenin phrased it, "No matter how much democracy there is under 
capitalism, the woman remains a ‘domestic slave’, a slave locked up in the 
bedroom, nursery, kitchen".  Anne Phillips agrees that there can be no equality 
under capitalism, saying that, "Left to its own devices, an unregulated market 
can never deliver this". 

Acknowledging that women are actually worse off than their male counterparts, 
Lenin called them the "unfortunate double victims of bourgeois society. 
Victims, first, of its accursed system of property and, secondly, of its 
accursed moral hypocrisy".  While the proletarian woman has to live in poverty, 
she also has to stay confined to the home.  Lenin believed that the proletarian 
cause could be aimed toward gender equality as well as class equality, and so 
advocated the removal of women from the domestic sphere and the implementation 
of women in the industrial sphere.  He strongly believed that "The proletariat 
[could] not achieve complete liberty until it [had] won complete liberty for 
women".  In such an exchange, the socialist movement would happily support the 
cause of women in exchange for women’s support of the socialist movement and 
their integration into the industrial sphere.  At first, this seems to be an 
arrangement that everybody benefits from.  However, the idea of the removal of 
women from the domestic sphere needs to be more closely examined. 
  
The removal all workers from the domestic labour force would certainly cause 
some problems.  Firstly, food would have to be prepared, children would have to 
be raised, and other daily domestic matters would have to be taken care of on a 
continual basis.  Frigga Haug is concerned that this alone isn’t enough to give 
freedom to women; she asks, "Is the main problem of women’s oppression that 
they have to work both in the factory and the home, so that their working days 
are too long?".  In response to this type of concern, Lenin assures Clara 
Zetkin that "We are organizing community kitchens and public dining-rooms, 
laundries and repair shops, crèches, kindergartens, children’s homes and 
educational institutions of every kind".  But who would be employed in these 
new positions?  Would the jobs be equally distributed between men and women? 
As if anticipating this question, Lenin says, "Our Communist women everywhere 
should co-operate methodically with young people.  This will be an extension 
of motherhood, will elevate it and extend it from the individual to the social 
sphere".  In other words, the same people will do the domestic work, but now it 
will be done publicly instead of privately.  This does not seem to contrast very 
much, if at all, with Lenin’s criticism that "Bourgeois ladies… dump all 
housework and the care for their children on the hired help".  As the work is 
transferred from the bourgeois woman to the proletarian woman, Lenin seems 
simply to wish to transfer the "stupefying and humiliating subjugation" from the 
private sphere to the social sphere.  Anne Phillips says that this kind of 
transfer is not truly an emancipation of women, stating the following: 

		Sexual equality, as I understand it, depends on a major 
        	restructuring of the relationship between paid and 
        	unpaid labour so as to detach this division between 
        	women and men.  Sexual equality cannot be achieved 
        	simply through socialized provision of services (more 
        	day care centers, more homes for the disabled of the 
        	mentally ill or the elderly), for while these can 
        	certainly help equalize conditions for women and men, 
        	they do so by shifting care responsibilities from 
                women working in the privacy of their own home to 
                (usually) women employed by the state. 

So the first problem with the socialist plan for sexual equality is that the 
low-control, domestic-type work is still being performed by women. 
   
The second problem with socialist policy for sexual equality is that it might 
not be such a good idea in all instances to force women out of the home and 
into the factory.  While social programs are a wonderful way to lighten the 
burden of domestic workers, and an absolute necessity for those households 
where all members are occupied by industrial labour, some people are highly 
suspicious of handing all of their responsibilities over to the state.  This 
may simply be a prejudice inspired by capitalist socialization since, in a 
society where wards of the state are associated with abandonment, 
unwantedness, and illegitimacy, the notion of turning children over to be 
raised by the state is unsavoury.  Lenin assures that the socialist state will 
eliminate distinctions between wedded and unwedded birth, but still, people in 
our society who have children usually want to socialize them in their own way, 
at their own discretion.  While I have no personal problem with the idea of 
communal child rearing and socialization, I don’t think this would go over well 
with certain people, new parents in particular.  However, Lenin insists that 
"the working woman… be the equal of the working man not only before the law but 
in actual fact".  In other words, women must not only be legal equals, but also 
economic equals for sexism to be eradicated.  And in order to be economic 
equals, women must not be tied down to the domestic sphere as they 
traditionally have.  Speaking further to this point, Lenin declares, "She who 
is a Communist belongs as a member to the Party, just as he who is a Communist. 
They have the same rights and duties.  There can be no difference of opinion on 
that score". 

Men and women should, undoubtedly, have the same duties.  While we have 
repeatedly heard that women should be forced to accept the same 
responsibilities as men, or as Frigga Haug puts it, "That female employment is 
a precondition for their emancipation has been a staple item of progressive 
politics in the workers’ movement", preconditions and dramatic lifestyle 
upheavals are not thrust upon men in the same way.  Perhaps equality of duties 
should mean that domestic work, like industrial work, should be shared equally 
between men and women, and not forever delegated to the realm of the feminine. 
But the fact that men, even socialist men, don’t want to get involved in 
domestic labour is proof that there is too little value attached to the work of 
women and too much value attached to the work of men.  Domestic labour is not 
considered to be as productive as industrial labour, and domestic labour is 
interchangeably considered to be drudgery or unskilled labour.  If the need to 
eat food and clean one’s own domicile is absolutely necessary, why is it 
ignored as a part of the functioning of society?  Because it does not benefit 
the greater good of society?  Because it only benefits the individual? 

Emancipation should give women the opportunity to do less work in the home and 
more work in the public sphere, and at the same time, it should give men more 
domestic labour to perform.  Lenin acknowledges that "Very few husbands, not 
even the proletarians, think of how much they could lighten the burdens and 
worries of their wives, or relieve them entirely, if they lent a hand in this 
‘women’s work’.  Even though his socialist policies do not include encouraging 
men to help out in the domestic sphere, he acknowledges that this is a viable 
alternative.  Building on this idea, it seems like the real way to eliminate 
sexism in society is by eliminating those notions that make us ascribe gendered 
characteristics to different kinds of work.  Some solutions are the 
subsidization of homecare for those who wish to raise children privately, 
public care for those who wish to be active in the workforce, and a 
restructuring of the modes of thought that cast women in the role of society’s 
caregivers.  Most importantly, to affect change we need to change the ways in 
which we think!  When we speak about working men, we need to question their 
role in domestic labour too.  It must not forever remain a topic only discussed 
in relation to women.  We need to insist on the importance of men as caregivers. 
We need to remove the stigma that there is something wrong with men who like 
children.  It is not only our perception of women that needs to change, but out 
perception of men as well.  We must all change and work toward a more equitable 
society, and we must do it for the sake of compassion and for the public good. 
If women need to change their lifestyles and men do not, the policy is sexist. 
Sexism cannot be eliminated through sexist policy.  So we must change our policy 
and change our way of thinking. The most vicious enemy of compassion is apathy.   
  
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       Read more of BMC's writing at N-Com (http://www.neo-comintern.com) 

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