Op-ed by R. Mars
One encounters so many nonsensical positions on the women’s question that it is hard to decide where to begin when writing on our topic. We have chosen a particularly nonsensical position to examine because doing so will allow us to get into important aspects of the women’s question from a Maoist perspective. The position is from a document issued by Austin Revolutionary Study Group called “Why LGBT People Will Be Oppressed As Long as Capitalism Exists” [accessible here]. We will call the author Comrade Krix for our purposes here. In the article, Comrade Krix states:
“Capitalism is a class society and class societies cannot exist without oppressing women and by extension LGBT people.” Class society can exist and in fact has existed without the oppression of women, as long as the working class rule society. This Jiminy Krix falsehood is issued like bad arithmetic where capitalism=class society, and therefore class society=oppression of women+etc., therefore! This arithmetic serves only to diffuse the actual class character of the oppression of women in capitalist society, and usher in all the situations faced by homosexuals into the women’s question, and all at the expense of really important Marxist concepts like the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and class struggle continuing under socialism, i.e. the very essence of Cultural Revolution.
Capitalism cannot maintain itself without the stratification of the exploited classes. This means that the oppression of women is preserved alongside the patriarchal vestiges of feudal society. Capitalism is a class society of course, but so is socialism. Capitalism, unlike other class societies, sets the preconditions of the emancipation of women via the socialization of labor. It is capitalism which through its industrial accomplishments has amassed a work force of women, and which has brought women into large scale production. Capitalism has set the precondition for the emancipation of women exactly as it sets the preconditions for the emancipation of men: through the emancipation of labor realized only in socialism.
Socialism is still a class society; a society in which one class suppresses the others. However, socialism has not, will not, and cannot maintain the oppression of women. To assert that it will maintain the oppression of women is to confuse non-antagonistic and antagonistic contradictions. This is not to suggest that all the backward culture and all the backward ideas about women will up and vanish without a fight, but it is to understand that the interpersonal issues, the old ideas, etc. will not be propped up by economic and social inequalities as they are now: inequalities which essentially rely upon and reproduce such chauvinism. While postmodern ideologies treat the interpersonal as the primary contradictions to resolve or at least observe, Marxism views the class struggle as the motor force of history. When socialism is established and one mode of production has replaced another, the lower stage, or transitional stage, of communist society has been accomplished. This necessitates the continuation of the socialist revolution under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to prevent capitalist restoration. Here the emancipation of women would be fully realized in culture and art, which would also transform social thinking and experience.
Postmodern criteria can conflate oppression with backward views or backward language and make no demarcation between the two. Marxism cannot share in this dangerous diffusal which ends up flattening contradictions. So we can confidently say that socialism is a class society which realizes the emancipation of women, and that this question will become sharper as the socialist revolution is continued under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. When we examine the actual conditions of women in socialist countries and compare them against what came before socialism and after capitalist restoration, we see that emancipation is possible. And like all power, it must be defended.
What were the conditions of women in China before 1949? We can bring up a few horrors: foot binding, wife and child selling, slavery, arranged marriage. And what was it like for women between 1949 and 1976? Revolutionary participation reaching a high point in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, equal access to work, maternity leave, right to divorce, abolition of prostitution, abolition of pornography, revolutionary culture against the idea of a deficient feminine nature. During the 1980s until today? Return of pornography, return of prostitution, return of backward ideas sexualizing women, etc. I point this out because we need to see here that capitalism was restored, and that socialist society meant class struggle continued. It is not right to just add things up and issue verdicts. We must look at things closer.
Women are oppressed under capitalism in the age of imperialism for two reasons, or at least two main reasons.
First, it’s a matter of keeping wages from increasing beyond a certain limit imposed by competitive market forces in the selling of labor power. Marxists have pointed this out for over a hundred years. By paying one half of the working class less, and with the advent of modern machinery equalizing labor between men and women, the fact that women with children are understood to be more reliable etc., the workers compete for lowering wages. This is the other end of labor aristocracy: those at the bottom, whose lack of social status, various discriminations, and numerous assaults all exist to perpetuate the economic conditions of women. It is not simply a matter of the origins of women’s oppression in the creation of the family or bad ideas. Origin helps explain a thing, but only metaphysics can conclude that it entirely explains a thing.
Secondly, women are oppressed because social reproduction is not socialized under capitalism. This is a cost saving effort as well as another contribution to the stratification of classes. In socialist society the majority exercises dictatorship over the minority and the state is no longer interested in preserving laws or customs preventing the socialization of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor under capitalism is either left to the proletarian (this includes dependents) or it is a profitable industry itself: at the time in which Marx wrote Capital, more workers in England—where he focused the book—were in the employment of the rich as care takers than were employed in factories.
Under socialism the canteen replaces the familial kitchen (capitalism accomplishes this with the restaurant but again this is privatized), the factory daycare replaces the at-home nursery (or private pre-schools etc.), and even domestic cleaning is done on a communal basis. There is no longer shame associated with this labor either. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the realization of the emancipation of women. It is the material fact of emancipation and a hammer tirelessly smashing those who seek to replace the chains. And once emancipated, the struggle reaches a new stage. The socialist revolution continues under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, corresponding to socialist society. Here, all the old backward ideas regarding women are removed and a new revolutionary culture takes power over the minds of the people. This is what is called Cultural Revolution.
The oppression of women emerges as the first act of class oppression. To leap from from this fact to conclude that this oppression will continue to exist inextricable in all class society negates, in a metaphysical way, the method of resolving the contradiction itself. This method is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It only makes sense that class society must be used against class society, that war is used against war, and that in this use, from a proletarian position, we march hand in hand beyond war and class society. What’s important to see here is how the socialist mode of production, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and its authority, the continuation of the socialist revolution under this authority are all in service to the emancipation of women. This concept is the one that divides communists from feminists. Socialism is undermined by the divisions capitalism requires in order to survive. We only have two options: socialism or the barbarism expressed by this outdated and completely rotten mode of production.
Why does the author from our first quotation insist that class society cannot exist without oppressing women, and still find no contradiction with calling himself a socialist? Let’s see. “…the private family can’t exist without women who can be dominated in this way. And the ruling class runs society so that the women of each new generation are raised up culturally (groomed, essentially) so that they (more or less) voluntarily enter into this role in the private family, and have too little economic independence to avoid it.” It must be said that if all women are coerced economically then they have lost agency as a group. Matters are far more complex than this. It is no longer strictly necessary to the existence of the bourgeois family to dominate women in the old way. The old ways have given to new ways. We now see adoption, the purchase of children, the purchase of wombs for a temporary period, and so on, combined with the formal legal recognition of same sex-marriages under bourgeois law. If this was essential to the preservation of class society as such, as Krix claims, we would see that the bourgeoisie would never grant such reforms as they could undermine the whole thing.
“And the ruling class runs society” in its interests. The ruling class rules society—nothing remotely insightful here. What is not expressed is that society and social consciousness are raised from the mode of production and are determined by it, corresponding to it in almost all cases. This omission can in fact lead one to believe that culture is more important than it is to the emancipation or so-called “liberation” of women (as feminism so often holds).
In fact, the entire system of inheritance has less value to capitalism than it once did, at least in regard to a male heir. Bourgeois women have become far more equal members of the bourgeoisie and are no longer strictly concealed prostitutes as they once were. This is where several hundred years of feminism has gotten us: near equality between imperialist men and imperialist women, and no emancipation for women in general. We are beginning to see that the changes in the base do have an effect on culture and society. It is a fact stamped on every portrayal of women from decade to decade. Adjust this all you like, nothing will solve the problem unless workers have power!
For proletarian women, economic independence and voluntary familial arrangements make even less sense as arguments. Even at the beginning of capitalism the proletarian family was mythical—an imitation of the ruling class custom. The fact of social reproduction being private is what chains working women to the home. Even if they can afford to purchase child care during the working hours, and hence take part in production proper, they are still bound to the home. There is no way that their wages—intentionally lower for women—can afford them any freedom from the family. This is a luxury only for bourgeois women, who pay everyone else from the lower classes to raise their children.
We have to stress this against all types of idealists: it is not a simple imitation. The formation of “families” among the proletariat has to do with the reproduction of labor power, that is, with social reproduction. When men and women enter a marital arrangement it is to meet ends, to divide labor where the result is the most economical one in the interests of their meager survival. This is not always conscious and it does not always work. In capitalist society, marriage between a man and women is the expression of cooperation forced onto workers in a very backward form of competition. The ideology gets in the way of cooperation in many cases. And in many cases it is the women and not the man capable of winning the bread. In these cases many proletarian men fall into despondency and unemployment rather than taking up the task of reproductive work. Among sections of the class, the men are increasingly cast out of production and the women are included in the most menial capacity, to affect entire racial groups with conditions facilitating stratification. In any case, and this is what matters, it is the bourgeoisie forcing the proletarian “family” to share a single wage (or live poorly off government subsidies), or to commit to purchasing the ability to work in order to accomplish the increasingly necessary dual “family” wage.
Today with falling profitability related to the overproduction of capital, the depression of real wages and the rise in cost of socially necessary commodities, the dual wage of both spouses is often not enough to make ends meet. The conventional bourgeois family is further reduced to garbage. Child labor, homeless families, families with young children and roommates and all manner of configurations are increasingly common among proletarians. Capitalism cannot solve its own contradictions. It can only adjust its way of coping. This is in the same respect as the old boarding houses of the industrial pre-imperialist period. This is how to manage the privatized reproduction of society, at least of the necessary workers and a surplus of them, while the productive process is social and the profit is private.
It is assumed by our writer under examination that everything is based on the family, and that the family is still essential to the functioning of capitalism exactly as it used to be: “Creating the private family is the only truly essential function of the oppression of women and LGBT people, [but] it does offer other advantages for the capitalist ruling class.” Metaphysics is like falling down a hill very fast—in order to not get dizzy and to hold one’s footing, one must analyze the actual conditions around oneself, then proceed from these conditions in order to understand the motion. Today in capitalist society the essential function of maintaining the oppression of women is the stratification of classes as a way to maintain this class society. While this is expressed in the bourgeois family, its expression does not end there. It is no longer the “only truly” anything, no matter how many qualifiers are strung together. But this materialist observation throws a wrench into the comrade’s general thesis as we will find the “only true” reason to oppress homosexuals and others who deviate in some way from the expected roles of men and women in capitalist (industrial) society is to maintain the bourgeois family form, which has undergone changes in the age of imperialist (monopoly and finance) society.
The fact is this: the breakdown of the old family forms correspond to a more complex system of exploitation represented by the decomposition of the mode of production—that is to say, the decay of capitalism. The “values” placed on the institutions of family are not the same, and while there are some reactionaries who will give us nausea to no end with their lamenting of this fact, there are even larger and growing sections of the imperialist ruling class who openly embrace the new “values” and the reformed bourgeois family. This comes through legal recognition for the “rights” of homosexuals to marriage, legal recognition against targeted loss of civil rights, and, in terms of culture, a statistical over-representation in media and entertainment.
The US ruling class in its majority has issued a verdict. The benefits from inclusion of this fringe group is greater for capital than their hitherto exclusion from the bourgeois family, which itself has become outdated, corresponding as it did to the phase of expansive industrial capitalism and not decomposing imperialist capitalism. Of course, the ruling class does not all agree on this, but the cultural shift among them here is not exclusively a matter of homosexuals struggling for recognition of certain rights either. It is not essential to stratification as long as the classes remain stratified along other dividing lines. It is not essential to the maintenance of the option of the conventional familial unit since the gap has closed a bit between the men and women of the ruling class. It is not essential to maintaining social reproduction since not everyone needs to reproduce anyway—imperialist countries have declining populations. The prejudices exist mainly as a question of religion and convention: something to be conserved by some and opposed by others among the ruling class itself. We have seen the rise of rainbow flags over the White House, the supreme building symbolizing US imperialist power on the global scale, making a concrete political threat to the world. With this we have seen it brandished against the people of the third world, and specifically the Arab and Islamic world, who are right now putting up the sharpest fight against US imperialism. Acceptance of homosexuality is being treated as the convenient yardstick of progress by the imperialists themselves, and not because they are interested in anyone’s democratic rights. Hence homosexuality is not a threat to the preservation of class society and can just as well be an asset to the sanitizing of the public image of imperialism.
Meanwhile, our writer continues to fall fast down the hill of his metaphysics, and we encounter the old feminist trope of “unpaid domestic work.” Where the truisms of liberal virtue fail to bring clarity, Marxist political economy will, at least for anyone willing to use it. There is no such thing as “unpaid domestic work.” The wage for reproductive labor is in fact contained in the productive worker’s wage. This is a law of capitalism. The worker sells labor power, and the value of the labor used for production is then only returned in a fraction. This is where value is created and profits are made, but not by the worker, who gets less than he or she put in. This “less than” is the wage and the wage only exists to cover the minimum cost of reproduction of a socially necessary number of workers. This is the essence of the matter, the “only truly” essential thing. Because reproductive labor does not directly add value in the production of commodities, it is non-valorizing and hence allotted for only in the wage of the worker and not by special consideration, except in the instance of government subsidies which is also necessary and useful to capital. This has a natural impact on wages too, some of which we have already examined.
But some work is indeed unpaid—that on which a profit is collected, that which adds wealth to those who do not work, but who instead own the means of production. So much goes into making this labor possible, and wages cannot even begin to cover it all for everyone. Poverty accumulates among the broad masses and the class contradictions sharpen. This is where we find “house work,” which today is almost never the exclusive job of a woman. She has to sell her socially reproductive labor skills on the market outside of the home as well. The charge of “unpaid domestic work” is an attempt to use feminism to divide working people into hostile corners, to make the nominal privileges of the male worker the equivalent of the exploiter himself.
Let us move to another confusion: “It economically limits women, feminine people generally, and LGBT people, forcing them into disproportionately more exploitative jobs, increasing capitalist profits.” Working women are doubly oppressed, regardless of how feminine they are, because they are oppressed as women and their sex has been posited in different expressions throughout class society and this one is no special exception.
Further, most reproductive labor jobs and menial work inflicted upon the female sex in capitalist society do not face a higher rate of exploitation because they are non-productive. The advance in these industries trails behind the productive industries like a string on a kite, and the rate of exploitation follows. Exploitation is a concrete material thing in the process of capitalist production. Wages are often lower in the trades comprised of a woman majority. This is not free of the fact that less labor power can be forced into a commodity in a given amount of time in these trades. The writer is not using the word exploitation here in the Marxist sense, and hence makes no sense at all.
We will leave it here, though Comrade Krix’s paper deserves a much more thorough flaying than we can give it in these few pages—instead using the paper as a starting point on the struggle around the women’s question, examining this topic to gain appreciation and understanding for the slogan: Unleash the fury of women as a force for proletarian revolution!
photo: Soviet daycare poster, London School of Economics and Political Science
