Editorial Board
In the lead up to International Working Women’s Day, March 8th 2024, The Worker is publishing a series of editorials highlighting the Women’s Question from the Marxist perspective, women revolutionaries, and the heroic women masses—especially class conscious proletarian women. In this installment, we examine the position taken by the great Lenin on the question of the emancipation of women through the socialist revolution. Marxists have always held firm on the question of the emancipation of women, long before the word “Feminism” had entered popular discourse and took on a meaning beyond the fancy of reactionary bourgeois women. What is more, the Marxists have accomplished greater things in terms of the emancipation of women than any feminist to date.
Lenin On Feminism and Proletarian Dictatorship
Having never accepted the faulty concept “feminism” in any of its various branding, Lenin was a firm believer that the women’s movement was an essential component of the mass movement:
“…the real freedom of women is only possible through communism,” Lenin remarked. “The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production, must be strongly brought out. That will draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism and it will also supply the basis for regarding the woman question as part of the social question, of the workers’ problem, and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and to the revolution.”
This distinction between Marxism and feminism is necessary still today, and it was with great foresight that Lenin proclaimed this difference ineradicable. From many sections of the left, the line between Marxism and feminism is still quite blurry. Some even go so far as imaginative but self-contradictory conjunctions. For Marxism, the freedom of women is not its own subject because it cannot be accomplished without proletarian revolution. In fact, it holds a special role in that struggle to which it is materially bound. Following this fact, Lenin expressed that “We must train those whom we arouse and win, and equip them for the proletarian class struggle under the leadership of the Communist Party. I am thinking not only of proletarian women, whether they work at the factory or at home. The poor peasant women, the petty bourgeois–they, too, are the prey of capitalism… The unpolitical, unsocial, backward psychology of these women, their isolated sphere of activity, the entire manner of their life—these are the facts. It would be absurd to overlook them, absolutely absurd. We need appropriate bodies to carry on work amongst them, special methods of agitation and forms of organization. That is not feminism, that is practical revolutionary expediency.”
In Lenin’s view, while women of the oppressed classes required special methods of agitation and organization, this task could not fall to women alone. Men must also take an active part in the struggle. He criticized men who blamed women for the work on the women’s front not proceeding quickly or smoothly. He criticized men for treating the revolutionization of women as an incidental matter. “Our communist work among the women,” Lenin stated, “our political work, embraces a great deal of educational work among men. We must root out the old ‘master’ idea to its last and smallest root, in the Party and among the masses. That is one of our political tasks, just as it is the urgently necessary task of forming a staff of men and women comrades, well trained in theory and practice, to carry on Party activity among working women.”
Having successfully led the proletariat to conquer and defend political power in Russia, in 1917 the great Lenin remarked, “The first proletarian dictatorship is truly paving the way for the complete social equality of women. It eradicates more prejudice than volumes of feminist literature.”
“In spite of all this,” he proclaimed “we do not yet have an international Communist women’s movement and we must have one without fail. We must immediately set about starting it. Without such a movement, the work of our International and of its parties is incomplete and never will be complete.”
Having established the only correct Marxist orientation to the organic line on the women’s question, Lenin consistently stressed the fundamental question of power. He stressed the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the realization of the emancipation of women and the guarantor of their complete social equality, as a task which must be fulfilled with socialist revolution. Lenin expressed that:
“The Soviet government was the first and only government in the world to abolish completely all the old, bourgeois, infamous laws which placed women in an inferior position compared with men and which granted privileges to men, as, for instance, in the sphere of marriage laws or in the sphere of legal attitude to children. The Soviet government was the first and only government in the world which, as a government of the toilers, abolished all the privileges connected with property, which men retained in the family laws of all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic. Where there are no landlords, capitalists and merchants, where the government of the toilers is building a new life without these exploiters, there equality between women and men exists in law. But that is not enough, it is a far cry from equality in law to equality in life. We want women workers to achieve equality with men workers not only in law, but in life as well. For this, it is essential that women workers take an ever increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state.”
Lenin insisted that “the proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.”
Lenin against Prostitution
With the decomposition of capitalism exhibited fully in its most decrepit and final stage, imperialism, social decomposition is seen everywhere—including in the ideological sphere. This fact is evident in the content of the most common bourgeois feminist trends, and especially postmodernism. The women’s question has been fully distorted by these haters of working women; all the humiliation and injustice experienced by women historically gets a face-lift, and like a magic trick these are distorted into “empowering” aspects of womanhood. Prostitution is sexual violence, and a type mainly directed at women, a filthy trade in women which is as old as class society. For the contemporary feminists, this question has been inverted and prostitution has been renamed as “sex work” and to oppose it is to oppose the “self-empowerment of women.” Marxists are resolute materialists and stand in stark opposition to such conceptions.
The great Lenin confronted the Fifth International Conference Against Prostitution in an article he wrote for Pravda in 1913. Unwavering in his criticism of the hypocrisy of bourgeois “solutions” to the issue mainly affecting women, he pointed out that the bourgeoisie could come up with nothing to fight prostitution beyond religion and police. The thrust behind Lenin’s scathing criticism of the bourgeois hypocrites was that they all denied the material poverty of women which economically coerced them into acts of prostitution, and hence they could not offer a solution. He further indicated that prostitution is backed up by the ruling class, that they are the main consumers in this rotten trade. We can gather from Lenin that there is a dual crime against women committed here by the bourgeoisie: first, the infliction of poverty, misery, and insecurity which forces some women into prostitution, and second the wealth of the bourgeoisie which affords them prostitutes—not only the poor women who are prostituted, but also the rich women who they purchase through marriage and who live their lives as virtuous prostitutes. Lenin wrote that:
“We may judge this disgusting bourgeois hypocrisy that reigns at these aristocratic-bourgeois congresses. Acrobats in the field of philanthropy and police defenders of this system which makes a mockery of poverty and need to gather ‘to struggle against prostitution,’ which is supported precisely by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie…..”
Under the Tsarist autocracy, prostitution was regulated in the interests of brothel owners. Upon conquering power, the Soviets banned it outright, abolishing the system of prostitution. Under the proletarian dictatorship, commissions were formed to provide new forms of work for the women trafficked and economically driven into prostitution. Medical treatment and job training were prioritized under political education and incorporation into the proletarian class struggle.
In socialist society everyone is given the ability to work, and no one is to live off the labor of others. Productive labor is prioritized and the masses are mobilized to carry it out. The vast majority embraced taking part in the revolution and the society it was creating. Those women who refused the class struggle of the proletariat, who rejected the job training and other social resources provided to them by the workers’ state and instead continued in their old trade, a trade belonging to the old society, developed from sexual slavery into capitalism of the small proprietor of black market wares, were then to be regarded as anti-social elements and labor deserters. They proved to be a minority of women, and a minority among those who were trapped in a life of prostitution under the regime of the Tsarists and capitalists. The white guard reaction made good use of the deserters of labor and they relied on the backwardness of the masses to weaken the Red Army during the Civil War. In this respect we can see two aspects of the proletarian dictatorship: on the one hand it obliterated the material conditions which sustained prostitution by providing a way out and integration into society, while on the other hand it fought the persistence of the trade among labor deserters with dictatorial means. In 1919, the Commission for Combating Prostitution was formed.
The Commission had its work cut out for it. After the war, capitalist relations resumed with the New Economic Program (NEP), and with these relations came a rise in prostitution and other black market profiteering. The Commission for Combating Prostitution increased its efforts at social rehabilitation in response. All organized forms of prostitution would be abolished in the process of socialist construction, led by comrade Stalin with the ending of the NEP and the liquidation of the Kulak.
Today we see that the capitalist solutions are just as hypocritical and bankrupt as they ever have been. On the one hand, the old reliable religion and police method is still used, and on the other hand there is the mass ideological sanitation of sexual violence and the trade in women through “empowerment” discourse and the chimera of “sex work” as work—behind this idea is always a capitalist looking to profit off of sex at the expense of women generally. For the US the most profitable sex-dens belong to the richest pimps who own online services, strip clubs, and other forms of violence and humiliation against women in general. It is very much in the interests of these capitalists to sanitize the whole fiasco as “sex work” and to remove the “stigma” and increase both the number of women they can prey on and the number of consumers. This has a further decomposing effect on the old, rotten, and hypocritical society. In contrast, the socialists led by Lenin first changed the material conditions, ending exploitation and providing new lives for women, and second combated the anti-socialist elements who were foolish enough to profiteer from sex trading under the proletarian dictatorship. It was understood then by every Communist that prostitution is irreconcilable with socialist society. We find today among the self proclaimed “communists” in the US a dearth of knowledge on this history and a tendency to liberalize their views according to postmodern criteria, sliding over to the enemy camp as revisionists on this question and others.
Lenin’s position on prostitution was consistent with his position on the women’s question generally, one which places the matter squarely in what is fundamental: political power for the proletariat, power for the dictatorship of the proletariat resting on the armed forces led by the Communist Party. Lenin remarked that “The question of prostitutes will give rise to many serious problems here. Take them back to productive work, bring them into the social economy. That is what we must do. But it is a difficult and complicated task to carry out in the present conditions of our economic life and in all the prevailing circumstances. There you have one aspect of the women’s problem which, after the seizure of power by the proletariat, looms large before us and demands practical solution. It will give us a great deal of work here in Soviet Russia.”
Lenin on the Oppression of Women
Lenin summed up the double oppression of working women like this, “For under capitalism the female half of the human race is doubly oppressed. The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly—and this is the main thing—they remain in ‘household bondage’, they continue to be ‘household slaves’, for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the family household.”
In the developed capitalist countries women have been forced into the workplace on a larger scale, but in a deformed manner. On the one hand the capitalist seeks women to exploit. On the other hand he prefers to populate certain industries (usually around socially necessary reproductive labor) with female workers, all while leaving housework to women generally. This stilted situation sets the preconditions for the emancipation of women, only realizable through socialist revolution and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, demonstrated for the first time ever by the leadership of the great Lenin.
Housework is only “necessary” under capitalism in the interests of dominating the working class. Capitalist productive capacity has in fact developed production to a level high enough to make housework unnecessary. Yet, women belonging to the exploited classes under capitalism are still chained to this backward task. Their incorporation into production has seldom mitigated the burden, especially for married women and single mothers.
In the US today, the majority of housewives are those of the very poor, lowest income workers who cannot afford childcare—that is to say, the cost of daycare would surpass one spousal income. Otherwise, housewives are the wives of the very rich, those who hire out housework to working women and are not chained to the kitchen. In the case of the very poor, the women often experience exploitation in the form of part time work, or working outside of the home during certain periods of the child’s life.
Working women being amassed in labor sets the conditions for their emancipation but it does not and cannot emancipate them—not from the legal inequalities which persist, nor from the less formal social and cultural inequalities which dominate their lives. It has not even emancipated them from the chains of the home. Socialism, as Lenin points out, is where real emancipation can begin. “Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labor on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins.”
Lenin poses large-scale socialist economy for a reason. He outlines the developments required to accomplish equality in a very material sense. “Public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens—here we have examples of these shoots, here we have the simple, everyday means, involving nothing pompous, grandiloquent or ceremonial, which can really emancipate women, really lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life. These means are not new, they (like all the material prerequisites for socialism) were created by large-scale capitalism. But under capitalism they remained, first, a rarity, and secondly—which is particularly important—either profit-making enterprises, with all the worst features of speculation, profiteering, cheating and fraud, or ‘acrobatics of bourgeois charity’, which the best workers rightly hated and despised.”
As socialist society has historically proven, Lenin was correct that the old housework can be overcome, and the full integration of women into production is possible, but not without common ownership of the means of production. Reproductive services would then be freed from the grip of the profiteers, the speculators, made common and not rare, and that vile thing called charity would be abolished with no room to exist. The workers themselves provide and manage the necessary social services, and dignity would be restored to all forms of work as the remaining bourgeois rights are restricted and controlled. Importantly, no one male or female would have their labor relegated and denigrated to the home in the private sense, where all manner of crimes against women are perpetuated in capitalist society.
Lenin wrote, “It is said that the level of culture is best characterized by the legal status of woman. There is a grain of profound truth in this saying. From this point of view, only the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, only the socialist state, could achieve and did achieve a higher level of culture. Therefore, the foundation (and consolidation) of the first Soviet Republic—and alongside and in connection with this, the Communist International—inevitably lends a new, unparalleled, powerful impetus to the working women’s movement.”
Lenin specifies working women and this is very important. While all women experience negative and backward culture against their sex, it is only the working women whose movement represents progress, and not the movement of the bourgeois women. Secondly, socialism is correctly understood to represent a cultural leap. The history of socialist states has confirmed the great thesis that the resistance of the bourgeoisie is magnified ten fold, that they will do anything to return the old society and take back control over production. In this, as developed by Chairman Mao Zedong, basing himself on the best work of Lenin, the socialist revolution is continued under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the cause of the working women is propelled to new heights. The old styles and fashions that immobilize, disable, or hinder women are discarded for practical styles and fashions. Women are no longer adorned as trophies or prizes for men, and this, along with the radical changes to the law, embody Leninist principles.
Those committed to the fight for the emancipation of women and the complete equality between women and men have everything to learn from Marxism, which has been the best weapon in this fight, because it prevents things from getting confused. Marxism sets the correct order of things. There are no shortage of those who idealize or overvalue cultural changes, but make no thought of what women could accomplish with equal control over the means of production. This consideration is everything for Marxists because political power is fundamental. In Lenin’s words:
“Down with this fraud! Down with the liars who are talking of freedom and equality for all, while there is an oppressed sex, while there are oppressor classes, while there is private ownership of capital, of shares, while there are the well-fed with their surplus of bread who keep the hungry in bondage. Not freedom for all, not equality for all, but a fight against the oppressors and exploiters, the abolition of every possibility of oppression and exploitation—that is our slogan!
Freedom and equality for the oppressed sex!
Freedom and equality for the workers, for the toiling peasants!”
image: “Emancipated Woman: Build Socialism!” poster by Adolf Strakhov, 1926
