Which road to women’s liberation?

A Women’s March in London in 2017 (Photo: Flickr)

Misogyny blights the lives of women across the globe. But there are many different ideas about how women should fight back.

The Marxist tradition offers an indispensable guide to challenging ­oppression and transforming the whole system.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels consistently argued and organised for women’s liberation. In the Communist Manifesto (1848) they denounce the way bosses see their wives as mere “­instruments of production” for producing heirs.

They became ­increasingly concerned with ­understanding the impact of industrialisation on women’s lives.

In the 1880s, a mass party based on Marxist ideas ­developed in Germany. One of the ­leaders, August Bebel, became the first Marxist to develop a more ­systematic account of women’s oppression.

His Women and Socialism was published in 1879. It was later republished as Women in the Past, Present and Future because of state censorship.

Bebel wrote, “The Socialist Party is the only party that has made the full ­equality of women, their liberation from every form of ­dependence and oppression, an integral part of its progress—not for ­reasons of propaganda, but from ­necessity.

“For there can be no liberation of mankind ­without social independence and ­equality of the sexes.”

Women and Socialism had a huge impact. It was translated into 20 languages and sold around 200,000 copies.

After Marx’s death in 1883, Engels used his notes to write The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,
published in 1884.

This was a pioneering study that showed that women’s oppression was not an ­inevitable feature of human society.

The key factor in how societies were organised was the ­production and ­reproduction of life, Engels wrote. He argued that for most of human history, people lived in egalitarian hunter gatherer societies.

Around 10,000 years ago, people found ways to produce more than they needed to survive. This created the basis for a ruling class to emerge—a class with control over the surplus.

The development of classes led to the replacement of kinship networks with the family unit. Engels called the rise of the family “the world historic defeat of the female sex”.

He explained how ­violence against women was baked into the institution of the family. To “make certain of the wife’s fidelity and therefore the paternity of his children, she is delivered over ­unconditionally into the power of the ­husband”.

“If he kills her, he is only ­exercising his rights,” he wrote.

The supposedly ­monogamous family is based on a ­fundamental hypocrisy. Women are punished for acts of ­infidelity which are “considered honourable in a man, or, at the worst, a slight moral blemish”.

Engels’s book ­connected with working class activism, women’s agitation for the vote and to socialist organisation across Europe.

Marx’s daughter, Eleanor Marx, and her partner Edward Aveling wrote a pamphlet, The Woman Question, in 1886 to defend Bebel and Engels.

They argued that marriage was a commercial ­transaction and that suppressing ­sexuality is devastating for women.

“The truth”, they wrote, “not fully recognised even by those anxious to do good to woman, is that she, like the labour-classes, is in an oppressed condition—that her position, like theirs, is one of merciless degradation.

“Both the oppressed classes, women and the immediate producers, must understand that their emancipation will come from themselves.”

Eleanor Marx ­understood women and workers as two distinct classes. Her ­formulation captured how oppression affected women, whatever their class position.

But it obscured how working class men and women shared a ­material interest in challenging that oppression.

The next Marxist to develop the ­understanding of women’s oppression was the great German socialist Clara Zetkin.

She developed an alternative to Eleanor Marx’s analysis, positioning women firmly within the working class.

Zetkin’s pamphlet The Women’s and Women Workers’ Question of Our Time was published in 1889. She developed the idea of liberating women from the “old cooking pot” through the construction of communal kitchens. This became a theme of revolutionary socialist women’s writings.

Zetkin consistently argued that working class women must organise independently of middle class women, and that unity with working class men was both possible and necessary.

In 1896, she wrote in Equality the women’s newspaper she edited, “The ­liberation struggle of the working class woman cannot be—as it is for the bourgeois woman—a s­truggle against the men of her own class.

“The end goal of her ­struggle is not free competition against men but bringing about the political rule of the ­working class.

“Hand in hand with the men of her own class, the working-class woman fights against capitalist society.”

The circulation of Zetkin’s paper won tens of thousands of women to join the socialist women’s movement in Germany before the First World War.

While Zetkin was developing her ideas in Germany, Nadezhda Krupskaya was applying Marxist ideas to Russia.

In 1889, while she was living in exile in Siberia with her husband, Vladimir Lenin, Krupskaya wrote The Woman Worker.

In the pamphlet Krupskaya examined the lives of working and peasant women. She wrote, “Only the complete victory of the workers striving to replace the current order by a socialist one can make women completely free.

“Thus, we see that a woman has a double interest in the ­success of the workers’ cause—as a worker and as a woman.

“The words ‘Proletarians of the World, Unite!’ cannot but meet with a response in a ­woman’s heart. She cannot but join the ranks of the fighters for a ­socialist system, for a better future.”

Krupskaya’s pamphlet was widely used in ­discussion groups for working class women.

The leading Russian ­revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai was ­influenced by Krupskaya’s ­writing and ­promoted the pamphlet.

Marxists ­identified the ­family unit as the material basis of women’s oppression. The ruling class family has historically functioned as an institution through which inheritance is passed to future generations.

The working class family took on the function of providing the labour the system needs to function. Workers need to be fed and given some respite from paid work. Children need to be cared for, and new ones born.

The family is a cheap way for capitalists to reproduce labour power. Almost the entire ­financial and emotional weight of childcare is pushed onto ­working class families with little or no expenditure from the state or the capitalist class.

The Bolsheviks led the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The new workers’ government enacted a raft of legislation which granted women legal equality, maternity pay and divorce.

The workers’ state also devoted considerable resources to empowering women and to providing alternatives to ­housework and childcare—­creches, laundries and canteens.

In 1920, Kollontai celebrated the changes while reassuring those who feared the end of the family. “The old family in which the man was everything and the woman nothing, the typical family where the woman had no will of her own, no time of her own and no money of her own, is changing before our very eyes,” she wrote.

“But there is no need for alarm. In the course of history, the structure of the family has changed many times—it was once quite different from the family of today.

“The structure of the family and the customs of family life also vary from nation to nation. Among some peoples such as the Turks, Arabs and Persians, a man is allowed to have several wives.

“Many practices which might astonish us and which might even seem immoral are considered by other peoples to be quite normal and they, in their turn, consider our laws and customs ‘sinful’.”

In Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle (1921) Kollontai described how capitalist society generates individualism and makes loneliness inevitable.

This loneliness forces us to seek a soulmate to possess exclusively, a lover who can, “charm away the gloom of
inescapable loneliness”.

Sexual freedom, Kollontai argued, required women to be liberated from the drudgery of housework. Then women and men would be free to establish new relationships based on equality and respect.

The Marxist approach to ending women’s oppression has continued to evolve and been enriched by ­discussions about anti-fascism, racism, ­colonialism and gender. New revolutions and ways of ­understanding the world have only strengthened this.

But the Marxist tradition remains more relevant than ever. For women who want to ­challenge and to win, to destroy capitalism and to create a world of freedom, equality and ­liberation, it is central.