Thread by @hereis_therose

"This resolution and this position on the suffrage gain even more meaning through the fact that in the first session of the Congress it was – expressly declared that a socialist *workers’* congress had absolutely nothing to do with

https://twitter.com/angryyellowgirl/status/1155195535109656576

the womens-rightsers. Just as on the war question the Congress stressed the difference between the ordinary bourgeois peace league, which cries ‘Peace, peace’ where there is no peace, and the economic peace party, the socialist party, which wants to remove the causes of

war – so too with regard to the ‘woman question’ the Congress equally clearly stressed the difference between the party of the ‘women’s-rightsers’ on the one side, who recognised no class struggle but only a struggle of sexes, who belong to the possessing class, and who want

rights that would be an injustice against their working-class sisters, and, on the other side, the real women’s party, the socialist party, which has a basic understanding of the economic causes of the present adverse position of working-women and which calls on the

working-women to wage a common fight hand-in-hand with the men of their class against the common enemy, viz. the men and women of the capitalist class.

The Brussels resolution is excellent as a declaration of principle – but what about its practical execution?

How are women to achieve the civil and political rights it demands? For, so long as we do not soberly and realistically consider what must be done, nothing will come of theoretical proclamations on what-ought-to-be. It is not enough to point to the class struggle.

The workers must also learn what weapons to use and how to use them; which positions to attack and which previously won advantages to maintain. And that is why the workers are now learning when and where to resort to strikes and boycotts, how to achieve protective

legislation for workers, and what has to be done so that legislation already achieved does not remain a dead letter. And now, what do we women have to do? One thing without any doubt. We will organise – organise not as ‘women’ but as *proletarians*; not as female rivals of

our working men but as their comrades in struggle.

And the most serious question of all is: *how* should we organise? Now, it seems to me that we must commence by organising as *trade-unionists* using our united strength as a means of reaching the ultimate goal, the

emancipation of our class. The job will not be easy. In fact, the conditions of female labour are such that it is often heartbreakingly difficult to make progress. But from day to day the job will become easier, and it will begin to look less and less difficult in proportion

as the women and especially the men learn to see what strength lies in the unification of *all workers*." (Emphasis hers)

"How Should We Organize?", Eleanor Marx
marxists.org/archive/draper…

"What form is taken by the women’s question among the women of the Upper Ten Thousand? A woman of this social stratum, by virtue of her possession of property, can freely develop her individuality; she can live in accordance with her inclinations. As a wife, however, she is

still always dependent on the man. The sexual tutelage of a former age has survived, as a leftover, in family law, where the tenet ‘And he shall be thy lord’ is still valid.

And how is the family of the Upper Ten Thousand constituted so that the woman is legally subjected to

the man? This family lacks moral premises in its very foundation. Not the individuality but money is decisive in its doings. Its law reads: What capital brings together, let no sentimental , morality put asunder. (‘Bravo!’) Thus, in the morality of marriage, two prostitutions

count as one virtue. This is matched also by the style of family life. Where the wife is no longer forced to perform duties, she shunts her duties as spouse, mother and housekeeper onto paid servants. When the women of these circles entertain a desire to give their lives serious

content, they must first raise the demand for free and independent control over their property. This demand therefore is in the centre of the demands raised by the women’s movement of the Upper Ten Thousand. These women fight for the achievement of this demand against the men of

their own class — exactly the same demand that the bourgeoisie fought for against all privileged classes: a struggle for the elimination of all social distinctions based on the possession of wealth.

...

And how does the women’s question manifest itself in the ranks of the

small and middle bourgeoisie, and in the bourgeois intelligentsia? Here it is not a matter of property dissolving the family, but mainly the phenomena accompanying capitalist production. As the latter completes its triumphal progress, in the mass the middle and small bourgeoisie

are more and more driven to ruin. In the bourgeois intelligentsia there is a further circumstance that makes for the worsening of the conditions of life: Capital needs an intelligent and scientifically trained labour force; it therefore favoured overproduction in proletarian

brain-workers, and contributed to the fact that the previously respectable and remunerative social position of members of the liberal professions is increasingly disappearing. To the same degree, however, the number of marriages is continually decreasing; for while the material

bases are worsening on the one hand, on the other the individual’s demands on life are increasing, and therefore the men of these circles naturally think twice and thrice before they decide to marry. The age limits for starting one’s own family are getting jacked up higher and

higher, and men are pushed into marriage to a lesser degree as social arrangements make a comfortable bachelor existence possible even without a legal wife. Capitalist exploitation of proletarian labour power ensures, through starvation wages, that a large supply of prostitutes

answers the demand from this same aspect of the male population. Thus the number of unmarried women in middle-class circles is continually increasing. The women and daughters of these circles are thrust out into society to establish a life for themselves, not only one that

provides bread but also one that can satisfy the spirit.

In these circles the woman does not enjoy equality with the man as owner of private property, as obtains in the higher circles. Nor does she enjoy equality as a working-woman, as obtains in proletarian circles. The women

of these circles must, rather, first fight for their economic equality with the men, and they can do this only through two demands; through the demand for equality in occupational education and through the demand for sex equality in carrying on an occupation. Economically

speaking, this means nothing else than the realisation of free trade and free competition between men and women. The realisation of this demand awakens a conflict of interest between the women and men of the middle class and the intelligentsia. The competition of women in the

liberal professions is the driving force behind the resistance of the men against the demands of the bourgeois women’s-rightsers. It is pure fear of competition; all other grounds adduced against intellectual labour by women are mere pretexts – women’s smaller brain, or their

alleged natural vocation as mothers. This competitive battle pushes the women of these strata to demand political rights, so as to destroy all limitations still militating against their economic activity, through political struggle.

...

For the proletarian woman, it is

capital’s need for exploitation, its unceasing search for the cheapest labour power, that has created the women’s question ... [2*] This is also how the woman of the proletariat is drawn into the machinery of contemporary economic life, this is how she is driven into the

workshop and to the machine. She entered economic life in order to give the husband some help in earning a living – and the capitalist mode of production transforms her into an undercutting competitor; she wanted to secure a better life for her family – and in consequence

brought greater misery to the proletarian family; the proletarian woman became an independent wage-earner because she wanted to give her children a sunnier and happier life – and she was in large part torn away from her children. She became completely equal to the man as

labour-power: the machine makes muscular strength unnecessary, and everywhere women’s labour could operate with the same results for production as man’s labour. And since she was a cheap labour force and above all a willing labour force that only in the rarest cases dared to

kick against the pricks of capitalist exploitation, the capitalists multiplied the opportunities to utilise women’s labour in industry to the highest degree.

The wife of the proletarian, in consequence, achieved her economic independence. But, in all conscience, she paid for it

dearly, and thereby gained nothing at the same time, practically speaking. If in the era of the family the man had the right – think back to the law in the Electorate of Bavaria – to give the wife a bit of a lashing now and then, capitalism now lashes her with scorpions. In

those days the dominion of the man over the woman was mitigated by personal relationships, but between worker and employer there is only a commodity relationship. The woman of the proletariat has achieved her economic independence, but neither as a person nor as a woman or wife

does she have the possibility of living a full life as an individual. For her work as wife and mother she gets only the crumbs that are dropped from the table by capitalist production.

Consequently, the liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be – as it is for the

bourgeois woman – a struggle against the men of her own class. She does not need to struggle, as against the men of her own class, to tear down the barriers erected to limit her free competition. Capital’s need for exploitation and the development of the modern mode of

production have wholly relieved her of this struggle. On the contrary; it is a question of erecting new barriers against the exploitation of the proletarian woman; it is a question of restoring and ensuring her rights as wife and mother. The end-goal of her struggle is not free

competition with men but bringing about the political rule of the proletariat. Hand in hand with the men of her own class, the proletarian woman fights against capitalist society. To be sure, she also concurs with the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement. But she regards

the realisation of these demands only as a means to an end, so that she can get into the battle along with the workingmen and equally armed."

"Only with the proletarian woman will socialism be victorious!" Clara Zetkin
marxists.org/archive/draper…

"If we ask, however, whether Women’s Liberation Movement in China has come to its end, the answer is definitely no. It is true that the landlord system has been abolished for nearly twenty years, but much of the feudal-patriarchal ideology still prevails among the peasants or

rather farmers. This ideology still does yield mischievous things in the rural places and some of the small towns. Only when the feudal-patriarchal ideology is eradicated can we expect the sexual equality fully established.

In order to build a great socialist society, it is

necessary to have the broad masses of women engaged in productive activity. With men, women must receive equal pay for equal work in production. Today in our country there are people’s communes in rural places where women receive less pay than men for equal work in production.

In certain villages patriarchal ideas still have their effect. Proportionately, more boys than girls attend school. Parents need the girls to do household work. Some even feel that girls will eventually enter another family and therefore it would not pay to send them to school.

Moreover, when girls are to be married, their parents often ask for a certain amount of money or various articles from the family of the would-be husband. Thus the freedom of marriage is affected. Finally, as farmers want to add the labour force in their families, the birth of a

son is expected while that of a daughter is considered a disappointment. This repeated desire to have at least one son has an adverse effect on birth control and planned births. A woman with many children around her naturally finds it too difficult to participate in any

productive labour. Another thing hampering a working woman is her involvement in household work. This prevents many women from full, wholehearted participation in public services.

From the present situation it is not difficult to understand that genuine equality between the

sexes can be realized and the Women’s Liberation Movement will be ended when and only when, led by a Marxist-Leninist political party, the process of the social transformation of society as a whole is completed, when the exploiting class or classes are exterminated, and when the

feudal-patriarchal and other exploiting-class ideologies are completely uprooted."

"Women's Liberation in China," Soong Ching Ling
marxists.org/subject/china/…

"What is the source of women’s oppression? Those who maintain that women constitute a caste or class are led to the conclusion that it is not capitalism but men who are the prime enemy. This position leads to a false strategy in our struggle for liberation.

The new stage in the struggle for women’s liberation already stands on a higher ideological level than did the feminist movement of the last century. Many of the participants today respect the Marxist analysis of capitalism and subscribe to Engels’ classic explanation of the

origins of women’s oppression. It came about through the development of class society, founded upon the family, private property and the state.

But there still remain considerable misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Marxist positions which have led some women who

consider themselves radicals or socialists to go off course and become theoretically disoriented. Influenced by the myth that women have always been handicapped by their child-bearing functions, they tend to attribute the roots of women’s oppression, at least in part, to

biological sexual differences. In actuality its causes are exclusively historical and social in character.

Some of these theorists maintain that women constitute a special class or caste. Such definitions are not only alien to the views of Marxism but lead to the false

conclusion that it is not the capitalist system but men who are the prime enemy of women. I propose to challenge this contention.

The findings of the Marxist method, which have laid the groundwork for explaining the genesis of woman’s degradation, can be summed up in the

following propositions:

First, women were not always the oppressed or “second” sex. Anthropology, or the study of prehistory, tells us the contrary. Throughout primitive society, which was the epoch of tribal collectivism, women were the equals of men and recognized by man as

such.

Second, the downfall of women coincided with the breakup of the matriarchal clan commune and its replacement by class-divided society with its institutions of the patriarchal family, private property and state power.

The key factors which brought about this reversal in woman’s social status came out of the transition from a hunting and food-gathering economy to a far higher mode of production based upon agriculture, stock raising and urban crafts. The primitive division of labor between the

sexes was replaced by a more complex social division of labor. The greater efficiency of labor gave rise to a sizable surplus product, which led first to differentiations and then to deep-going divisions between the various segments of society.

By virtue of the directing roles played by men in large-scale agriculture, irrigation and construction projects, as well as in stock raising, this surplus wealth was gradually appropriated by a hierarchy of men as their private property. This, in turn, required the institution

of marriage and the family to fix the legal ownership and inheritance of a man’s property. Through monogamous marriage the wife was brought under the complete control of her husband who was thereby assured of legitimate sons to inherit his wealth.

As men took over most of the activities of social production, and with the rise of the family institution, women became relegated to the home to serve their husbands and families. The state apparatus came into existence to fortify and legalize the institutions of private

property, male dominion and the father-family, which later were sanctified by religion.

This, briefly, is the Marxist approach to the origins of woman’s oppression. Her subordination did not come about through any biological deficiency as a sex. It was the result of the

revolutionary social changes which destroyed the equalitarian society of the matriarchal gens or clan and replaced it with a patriarchal class society which, from its birth, was stamped with discriminations and inequalities of many kinds, including the inequality of the sexes.

The growth of this inherently oppressive type of socio-economic organization was responsible for the historic downfall of women.

But the downfall of women cannot be fully understood, nor a correct social and political solution worked out for their liberation, without seeing what

happened at the same time to men. It is too often overlooked that the patriarchal class system which crushed the matriarchy and its communal social relations also shattered its male counterpart, the fratriarchy — or tribal brotherhood of men. Woman’s overthrow went hand in hand

with the subjugation of the mass of toiling men to the master class of men.

...

Consequently, the pairing family, which appeared at the dawn of the family system, differed radically from the nuclear family of our times. In our ruthless competitive capitalist system, every tiny

family must sink or swim through its own efforts - it cannot count on assistance from outside sources. The wife is dependent upon the husband while the children must look to the parents for their subsistence, even if the wage-earners who support them are stricken by

unemployment, sickness or death. In the period of the pairing family, however, there was no such system of dependency upon “family economics,” since the whole community took care of each individual’s basic needs from the cradle to the grave.

This was the material basis for the

absence, in the primitive commune, of those social oppressions and family antagonisms with which we are so familiar.

It is sometimes said or implied that male domination has always existed and that women have always been brutally treated by men. Contrariwise, it is also widely

believed that the relations between the sexes in matriarchal society were merely the reverse of our own - with women dominating men. Neither of these propositions is borne out by the anthropological evidence.

...

As Engels pointed out, with the rise of private property,

monogamous marriage and the patriarchal family, new social forces came into play in both society at large and in the family setup which destroyed the rights exercised by earliest womankind. From simple cohabitation of pairing couples there arose the rigidly freed, legal system

of monogamous marriage. This brought the wife and children under the complete control of the husband and father who gave the family his name and determined their conditions of life and destiny.

Women, who had once lived and worked together as a community of sisters and raised

their children in common, now became dispersed as wives of individual men serving their lords and masters in individual households. The former equalitarian sexual division of labor between the men and women of the commune gave way to a family division of labor in which the woman

was more and more removed from social production to serve as a household drudge for husband, home and family. Thus women, once “governesses” of society, were degraded under the class formations to become the governess of a man’s children and his chief housemaid.

This abasement

of women has been a permanent feature of all three stages of class society, from slavery through feudalism to capitalism. So long as women led or participated in the productive work of the whole community, they commanded respect and esteem. But once they were dismembered into

separate family units and occupied a servile position in home and family, they lost their prestige along with their influence and power.

...

Here it is necessary to note a distinction between two degrees of women’s oppression in monogamous family life under the system of

private property. In the productive farm family of the pre-industrial age, women held a higher status and were accorded more respect than they receive in the consumer family of our own city life, the nuclear family.

So long as agriculture and craft industry remained dominant in

the economy, the farm family, which was a large or “extended” family, remained a viable productive unit. All its members had vital functions to perform according to sex and age. The women in the family helped cultivate the ground and engaged in home industries, as well as

bearing children, while the children and older folks produced their share according to ability.

This changed with the rise of industrial and monopoly capitalism, and the nuclear family. Once masses of men were dispossessed from the land and small businesses to become wage

earners in factories, they had nothing but their labor power to sell to the capitalist bosses for their means of subsistence. The wives of these wage earners, ousted from their former productive farm and home-craft labors, became utterly dependent upon their husbands for the

support of themselves and their children. As men became dependent upon their bosses, their wives became more dependent upon their husbands.

By degrees, therefore, as women were stripped of their economic self-dependence, they fell ever lower in social esteem. At the beginning

of class society they had been removed from social production and social leadership to become farm-family producers, working through their husbands for home and family. But with the displacement of the productive farm family by the nuclear family of industrial city life, they

were driven from their last foothold on solid ground.

Women were then given two dismal alternatives. They could either seek a husband as provider and be penned up thereafter as housewives in city tenements or apartments to raise the next generation of wage slaves. Or the

poorest and most unfortunate could go as marginal workers into the mills and factories (along with the children) and be sweated as the most downtrodden and underpaid section of the labor force.

Over the past generations women wageworkers have conducted their own labor struggles

or fought along with men for improvements in their wages and working conditions. But women as dependent housewives have had no such means of social struggle. They could only resort to complaints or wrangles with husband and children over the miseries of their lives. The friction

between the sexes became deeper and sharper with the abject dependency of women and their subservience to men.

Despite the hypocritical homage paid to womankind as the “sacred mother” and devoted homemaker, the worth of women sank to its lowest point under capitalism. Since

housewives do not produce commodities for the market nor create any surplus value for the profiteers, they are not central to the operations of capitalism. Only three justifications for their existence remain under this system: as breeders, as household janitors, and as buyers

of consumer goods for the family.

While wealthy women can hire servants to do the dull chores for them, poor women are riveted to an endless grind for their whole lives. Their condition of servitude is compounded when they are obliged to take an outside job to help sustain the

family. Shouldering two responsibilities instead of one, they are the “doubly oppressed.”

Even middle-class housewives in the Western world, despite their economic advantages, are victimized by capitalism. The isolated, monotonous, trivial circumstances of their lives lead them

to “living through” their children - a relationship which fosters many of the neuroses that afflict family life today. Seeking to allay their boredom, they can be played upon and preyed upon by the profiteers in the consumer goods fields. This exploitation of women as consumers

is part and parcel of a system that grew up in the first place for the exploitation of men as producers.

The capitalists have ample reason for glorifying the nuclear family. Its petty household is a gold mine for all sorts of hucksters from real estate agents to the

manufacturers of detergents and cosmetics. Just as automobiles are produced for individual use instead of developing adequate mass transportation, so the big corporations can make more money by selling small homes on private lots to be equipped with individual washing machines,

refrigerators, and other such items. They find this more profitable than building large-scale housing at low rentals or developing community services and child-care centers.

In the second place, the isolation of women, each enclosed in a private home and tied to the same

kitchen and nursery chores, hinders them from banding together and becoming a strong social force or a serious political threat to the Establishment.

What is the most instructive lesson to be drawn from this highly condensed survey of the long imprisonment of womankind in the

home and family of class society -which stands in such marked contrast to their stronger, more independent position in pre-class society? It shows that the inferior status of the female sex is not the result of their biological makeup or the fact that they are the child-bearers.

Child-bearing was no handicap in the primitive commune; it became a handicap, above all, in the nuclear family of our times. Poor women are torn apart by the conflicting obligations of taking care of their children at home while at the same time working outside to help sustain

the family.

Women, then, have been condemned to their oppressed status by the same social forces and relations which have brought about the oppression of one class by another, one race by another, and one nation by another. It is the capitalist system - the ultimate stage in

the development of class society - which is the fundamental source of the degradation and oppression of women.

Some women in the liberation movement dispute these fundamental theses of Marxism. They say that the female sex represents a separate caste or class.

Ti-Grace Atkinson, for example, takes the position that women are a separate class; Roxanne Dunbar says that they comprise a separate caste. Let us examine these two theoretical positions and the conclusions that flow from them.

First, are women a caste? The caste hierarchy

came first in history and was the prototype and predecessor of the class system. It arose after the breakup of the tribal commune with the emergence of the first marked differentiations of segments of society according to the new divisions of labor and social functions.

Membership in a superior or inferior station was established by being born into that caste.

It is important to note, however, that the caste system was also inherently and at birth a class system. Furthermore, while the caste system reached its fullest development only in

certain regions of the world, such as India, the class system evolved far beyond it to become a world system, which engulfed the caste system.

...

Neither in the caste system nor the class system - nor in their combinations - have women comprised a separate caste or class.

Women themselves have been separated into the various castes and classes which made up these social formations.

The fact that women occupy an inferior status as a sex does not ipso facto make women either an inferior caste or class. Even in ancient India women belonged to

different castes, just as they belong to different classes in contemporary capitalist society. In the one case their social status was determined by birth into a caste; in the other it is determined by their own or their husband’s wealth. But the two can be fused - for women as

for men. Both sexes can belong to a superior caste and possess superior wealth, power and status.

...

In that document [Roxanne Dunbar] says that her characterization of women as an exploited caste is nothing new; that Marx and Engels likewise “analyzed the position of the

female sex in just such a way.” [1] This is simply not the case. Neither Marx in Capital, nor Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, nor in any writings by noted Marxists from Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg on this matter, has woman been defined by virtue

of her sex as a “caste.” Therefore this is not a mere verbal squabble over the misuse of a term. It is a distinct departure from Marxism, although presented in the name of Marxism.

...

What Marxists say is that we live under an international class system. And they further

state that it will require not a caste war, but a class struggle — of all the oppressed, male and female alike — to consummate women’s liberation along with the liberation of all the oppressed masses.

...

Turning to the other position, it is even more incorrect to characterize

women as a special “class.” In Marxist sociology a class is defined in two interrelated ways: by the role it plays in the processes of production and by the stake it has in the ownership of property. Thus the capitalists are the major power in our society because they own the

means of production and thereby control the state and direct the economy. The wage workers who create the wealth own nothing but their labor power which they have to sell to the bosses to stay alive.

Where do women stand in relation to these polar class forces? They belong to

all strata of the social pyramid. The few at the top are part of the plutocratic class; more among us belong to the middle class; most of us belong to the proletarian layers of the population. There is an enormous spread from the few wealthy women of the Rockefeller, Morgan and

Ford families to the millions of poor women who subsist on welfare dole. In short, women, like men, are a multiclass sex.

This is not an attempt to divide women from one anther but simply to recognize the actual divisions that exist. The notion that all women as a sex have more

in common than do members of the same class with one another is false. Upper-class women are not simply bedmates of their wealthy husbands. As a rule they have more compelling ties which bind them together. They are economic, social and political bedmates, united in defense of

private property, profiteering, militarism, racism - and the exploitation of other women.

...

Tens of thousands of women went to the Washington antiwar demonstrations on November 1969 and again in May 1970. Did they have more in common with the militant men marching beside

them on that life and death issue - or with Mrs. Nixon, her daughters, and the wife of the attorney general, Mrs. Mitchell, who peered uneasily out of her window and saw the specter of another Russian Revolution in those protesting masses? Will the wives of bankers, generals,

corporation lawyers and big industrialists be firmer allies of women fighting for liberation than working-class men, Black and white, who are fighting for theirs? Won’t there be both men and women on both sides of the class struggle? If not, is the struggle to be directed

against men as a sex rather than against the capitalist system?

It is true that all forms of class society have been male-dominated and that men are trained from the cradle on to be chauvinistic. But it is not true that men as such represent the main enemy of women. This

crosses out the multitudes of downtrodden, exploited men who are themselves oppressed by the main enemy of women, which is the capitalist system. These men likewise have a stake in the liberation struggle of the women; they can and will become our allies.

Although the struggle

against male chauvinism is an essential part of the tasks that women must carry out through their liberation movement, it is incorrect to make that the central issue. This tends to conceal or overlook the role of the ruling powers who not only breed and benefit from all forms of

discrimination and oppression but are also responsible for breeding and sustaining male chauvinism. Let us remember that male supremacy did not exist in the primitive commune, founded upon sisterhood and brotherhood. Sexism, like racism, has its roots in the private property

system.

A false theoretical position easily leads to a false strategy in the struggle for women’s liberation. Such is the case with a segment of the Redstockings who state in their Manifesto that “women are an oppressed class.” [2] If all women compose a class then all men must

form a counterclass - the oppressor class. What conclusion flows from this premise? That there are no men in the oppressed class? Where does this leave the millions of oppressed white working men who, like the oppressed Blacks, Chicanos and other minorities, are exploited by the

monopolists? Don’t they have a central place in the struggle for social revolution? At what point and under what banner do these oppressed peoples of all races and both sexes join together for common action against their common enemy? To oppose women as a class against men as a

class can only result in a diversion of the real class struggle.

Isn’t there a suggestion of this same line in Roxanne Dunbar’s assertion that female liberation is the basis for social revolution? This is far from Marxist strategy since it turns the real situation on its head.

Marxists say that social revolution is the basis for full female liberation - just as it is the basis for the liberation of the whole working class. In the last analysis the real allies of women’s liberation are all those forces which are impelled for their own reasons to

struggle against and throw off the shackles of the imperialist masters.

The underlying source of women’s oppression, which is capitalism, cannot be abolished by women alone, nor by a coalition of women drawn from all classes. It will require a worldwide struggle for socialism

of the working masses, female and male alike, together with every other section of the oppressed, to overthrow the power of capitalism which is centered today in the United States.

...

The maxim of the Irish revolutionists - “who would be free themselves must strike the blow” -

fully applies to the cause of women’s liberation. Women must themselves strike the blows to gain their freedom. And this holds true after the anti-capitalist revolution triumphs as well as before.

In the course of our struggle, and as part of it, we will reeducate men who have

been brainwashed into believing that women are naturally the inferior sex due to some flaws in their biological makeup. Men will have to learn that, in the hierarchy of oppressions created by capitalism, their chauvinism and dominance is another weapon in the hands of the master

class for maintaining its rule. The exploited worker, confronted by the even worse plight of his dependent housewife, cannot be complacent about it - he must be made to see the source of the oppressive power that has degraded them both.

Finally, to say that women form a

separate caste or class must logically lead to extremely pessimistic conclusions with regard to the antagonism between the sexes in contrast with the revolutionary optimism of the Marxists. For, unless the two sexes are to be totally separated, or the men liquidated, it would

seem that they will have to remain forever at war with each other.

As Marxists we have a more realistic and hopeful message. We deny that women’s inferiority was predestined by her biological makeup or has always existed. Far from being eternal, woman’s subjugation and the

bitter hostility between the sexes are no more than a few thousand years old. They were produced by the drastic social changes which brought the family, private property and the state into existence.

"Women: Caste, Class or Oppressed Sex," Evelyn Reed
marxists.org/archive/reed-e…