----- ) )-0----)000(----0-( ( ( ----------------------- ) +-0-=0+ T + C + A + H + R +0=-0-+ ( ----------------------- ) ) )-0----)000(----0-( ( ----- "To aid in the incubation, breeding, and release of butterflies in Asia." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Vol. 02, Iss. 16 Marxism and Women by BMC ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Read more of BMC's writing at N-Com (http://www.neo-comintern.com) _________________________________________________________________ / _______________________________________________________________ \ | / \ | || TCAHR wants your children, but will settle for your writing. || || Got an idea for an article? Perhaps a rebuttal to something || || you read here? Send 'em in and bask in the reflected glory || || of a meglomanatical would-be dictator and his attempt at || || world infection. 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