COMMUNISM AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXISM

COMMUNISM ANDTHE STRUGGLEAGAINST SEXISM

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS SEXISM?By sexism we mean the way class society is organized around the

inequality of women relative to men. The main aspect of sexism is thespecial oppression of women of the working class. (The ideology thatjustifies the special oppression of women in class society is sometimesalso called sexism, or male chauvinism. To avoid confusion, we willuse the term “sexist ideology” for this.) For example, in the worldtoday:

l Women’s industrial wages average only threequarters of thewages of men. (You might call this “six hours pay for eight hourswork”!)

l Women are sold as child-brides and forced into other forms ofprostitution,

l Female infanticide is againIndia.

increasingly common in China and

l In some countries, a woman’s word officially counts for less than aman’s word in court, which effectively legalizes rape.

Class society in the world today is capitalism. Therefore, sexismtoday is an aspect of capitalism and we cannot end sexism withoutending capitalism. Only communism-the end of class society--canend sexism. On the other hand, it is impossible to destroy capitalismwithout destroying sexism. To retain aspects of sexism in a societyrrtying to destroy capitalism would be similar to retaining racialsegregation, or separate nations, or wages. It would mean keepingelements of capitalism that would lay the basis for the restoration offull-blown capitalism. So it is very important that we understand theparticularities of sexism in capitalist society today. In fighting themour movement lays the basis for smashing sexism once we take power

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXISM PAGE 15

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No one has a crystal ball to seeinto the future, but it is useful tobegin now to think concretelyabout how communism wouldchange the position of women insociety, Our vision of the future,and our confidence in theworkers’ ability to create this fu-ture, motivate our political workas much, if not even more, thanour hatred of the capitalists andtheir vicious system. Abetter un-derstanding of sexism willdeepen our understanding ofcapitalist institutions and ideo-logy and how to fight them. Inparticular, it should help ussharpen the struggle to winwomen workers and students totake more leadership in the workof the party.

MEN WORKERS:JOIN WITHWOMEN WORKERSTO FIGHT SEXISM

Marxists traditionally havespoken of the “woman question,”but the fight against sexism isalso in the vital interest of work-ing class men. A working classdivided against itself, menagainst women, will never beable to take and hold power. Asthe Chinese communists put it,“women hold up half the sky.” Aworking class that does not strug-gle for equality within its rankscannot possibly create a com-munist world. A working classthat does not recognize the

significance of “women’s work”in the home will be at a loss toorganize an economic system ofproduction and distributionbased on a voluntary associationof workers.

Working class men still thinksometimes that, at least in theshort run, sexism works to theiradvantage. After all, isn’t it eas-ier to sit down and relax after ahard day at work than it is toshare the household chores?Doesn’t a man have a better ch-ante at a job if the boss refuses tohire a woman for the position?But this is a very short-sightedpoint of view, from an economicand an emotional perspective aswell as from a political one. Menworkers who join actively in thefight against sexism live better a~a result, just as workers who joinin the communist movement arebetter for it, even if it turns outthat we don’t live to see a cotn-munist world. As an aspect ofcapitalism, sexism oppresses andexploits all workers. It dividesthe strength of the working classby creating barriers betweenmen workers and women work-ers. It weakens the fighting abil-ity of individual workers 1):.encouraging stereotyped andself-destructive ways of life aadthought among both women andmen, So the fight against sexismis in the interest of the wholeworking class.

At the same time, we must

THE STRUGGLE AGAINSTSEXKM

recognize that women of theworking class shoulder a greaterburden of sexist exploitationthan men of the working class.They are more intensively ex-ploited by the bosses, oftenforced into the lowest-paying jobcategories, or paid less than mendoing the same work. Amongthe low-paid workers in MexicoCity, for example, women aret\\.ice as IikeIy as men to be earn-i tlg less than the minimum wage.IVomen suffer higher rates ofpoverty, malnutrition and illiter-ac!‘, especially in countries withrhe worst poverty generally.

\l’hile bosses harass all workers,\\‘omen workers are especially~ulnerablc to sexual harassmenton the job. Most working class\\.o~nen in all countries (marriedznd single) work a “double shift,”coming home from a paid job tohours and hours more of unpaidhousework and/or child care. Wecan only build unity among men;~nd women workers by fightingrogcther against these and other;lspects of inequality. In addition,most women have to deal with(oppressive attitudes and actionsof j e a l o u s , d e m a n d i n g , o rdomineering male partners,relatives, and friends who havefallen for the bosses’ sexist lies.The fight for equality among\comen and men workers there-fijre is reflected within our move-ment, our households, and ourcircle of friends.

SOME HISTORICALBACKGROUND

Sexism existed in other formsof class society before capitalism.In fact, class society probablybegan with the subjection ofwomen to men. We know that inall societies based on private pro-perty, in which property is in-herited in the male line (father toson), the woman also became thelegal property of her husband.In this way, he tried to ensure that“his” property would go to “his”sons. The vast majority of peo-ple had no property anyway, butthey were still bound by the lawsand customs - sanctified byJudaism, by Is lam, and byChris t iani ty , a m o n g o t h e rreligions - enforced by the rul-ing class in its own interest.

Survivals of feudalism in thetwentieth century suggest howharsh the oppression of womencould be. At the time of theBolshevik Revolution, for exam-ple, women of Uzbekistan wereforced to wear dark, evil-smell-ing horsehair veils; they slept onthe floor beside the couch onwhich the husband slept, so hecould kick her awake when hewanted anything.

In the early to mid 1800s itlooked as though industrialcapi ta l i sm might break thechains that had kept women leg-ally enslaved to their fathers and

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXtSM PAGE I7

husbands within the family.Women of the working class werebeing drawn into European andNorth American factories as asource of cheap labor. Many, in-cluding Marx and Engels attimes, seemed to think that thespecial oppression of womenwould be ended in this way. Ofcourse, working-class womenwould still be chained side by sidewith men workers to wage-slav-ery. But at least they would befighting to break these chains onthe basis of equality of exploita-tion.

There was some truth to this.Women w o r k e r s o f thenineteenth and early twentiethcenturies led manv heroic battlesof the class struggle. The “Uni-ted Tailoresses of New York”struck for higher wages in 1825.T h e b l a c k w o m e n o f t h e“Washerwomen’s Association of.4tlanta,” thousands strong,struck for higher pay in 1881.Women workers in hlesicorepeatedly led strikes in thetobacco industry between 1880and 1885, demanding higherwages, shorter hours, and betterworking conditions for all work-ers. The Russian revolution ofFebruary 1917 was sparked by ademonstration led by the womenworkers of the Vyborg district ofPetrograd in honor of Inter-national Women’s Day. Manymore such stories brighten thepages of the history of the inter-

national working class.

But equality ofwomen and men- even equality of exploitation- didn’t come about. In fact, ascapitalism developed fully int.oits imperialist stage, the specialoppression of women workers(most of all, those identified as“racial” or ethnic minorities)actually intensified. Imperialistsand their agents became in-creasingly adept at using sexismto their own advantage, drawingwomen into the wage labor forceduring labor shortages (for cs-ample, wartime) and forcingthem out when, with increasingfrequency and severity, ccono-mic crises demanded reductionsin the wage labor force.

One example is the effect of rllcinternational crisis of 1907-8 011the working class of Xlesiro.Both the numbers ofwomcn ant!the percentage ofwomen amongall workers dropped in nearlievery sector of the econom): 1111910, women comprised onl!25% of industrial workers ant140% of semice workers, but 53$of the unemployed. Around I .3million women workers ~t’ercdriven out of the work force al-together, compared with half amillion men.

Some examples from the Uni-t e d S t a t e s s h o w h o w thecapitalists used state power todrive women out of the work-force during economic depres-

THE STRUGGLE AGAlNST SEXlSM

s ion. T h e HighIand P a r k ,Michigan city council excludedmarried women from municipaljobs in 1921, and, soon after, ex-cluded single women as well.The federal Economy Act of 1930responded to mass unemploy-ment by prohibiting spousesfrom both holding jobs in thefederal government. Some citygovernments went a step further,outlawing the employment ofmarried women whose husbandscarned a “living wage” as definedby the law. By 1939, such laws~‘ere on the books in 26 states.

During World War II, in contr-ast, as men were drafted womenIvere urged to “take thejob he leftbehind.” Government pro-pagandists distributed films andposters showing happy women(complete with make-up) work-ing as welders and in othertradi t ional ly male j o b s .Bourgeois psychologis tscooperated by proclaiming thatbreastfeeding (and too muchmaternal attention generally)was bad for children. The veryreal problems of single workingmothers were conveniently ig-nored. And once the war ended,the psychologists quickly decidedthat chi ldren needed the irmothers’ full-time attention afterall. The TVs that appeared innearly every American home by1960 provided a still morepowerful weapon to push thestereotyped families of “The

Donna Reed Show,” “Ozzie andHarriet, n “Leave It To Beaver,”and “Father Knows Best.”

A long-term trend can be foundunderneath these calculatedshort-term manipulations of thelabor market. As U.S. imperial-ism gained access to the cheaperlabor of workers (children, men,women) in Latin America, Asia,and elsewhere, it had less need ofthe labor of children or womenin the United States itself. InPuerto Rico, for example, fewerthan 10% of women worked out-side the home in 1899; thirtyyears later, after U.S. imperial-ism reshaped the Puerto Ricaneconomy to its own ends, over25% of women had outside jobs.Of course, they still had their ownhousework to do.

U.S. workers (including bothmen and women) had longdemanded the so-called “familywage”: pay for men workershigh enough to support theirwives and children. They hadd e m a n d e d r e s t r i c t i o n s o nwomen’s work (in the name of“protection”) and educationalopportunities for their children.Since women who worked forwages (especially if they weremarried and/or had children)came home to another full day ofunpaid housework, they oftenpreferred not to hold an outsidejob. Consider, for example, thatuntil very recently black marriedwomen in the U.S. worked outs-

THE STRUGGLE AGAfNST SEXISM PAGE 19

ide their own homes in pro-portionally far greater numbersthan white married women. In1920, for example, about 33% ofblack wives worked for wages,compared to about 6% of whitewives. Since black women weresegregated into the least dcsir-able jobs (mostly as domesticworkers for white families), thiswas scarcelv a measure of theirgreater “liberation”!

The bosses had fought theworkers’ demands ferociously aslong as their profits depended onthe low-paid labor of U.S .children and adult women. Bythe 192Os, the rise of U.S. im-perialism - together with tech-nological changes in production- had changed things. Legalrestrictions on the labor ofchildren and of women were en-acted. Free public education wasextended to teenagers and madecompulsory, In 1910, under 15%of 14- to 17-year-olds in the U.S.attended school; by 1940 the fig-ure was over 70%.

But as with other reformsachieved under capitalism, thesewere quickly turned against theworkers. Scliool officials an-nounced proudly that their in-stitutions fostered social controlthrough “.4mcricaniwtion”: theindoctrination of young workerswith every rotten idea the bossescould think of. The role of the“housewife” was glorified to suitthe needs of the capitalists for a

flexible labor force and increns-ing consumption of the productsof industry. Bosses couId nowjustify sexist wage differentialswith the lie that since men work-ers could support their families,women’s income was “onlysupplemental” or “pin money.”Sexist ideology also helpedcapitalists to blunt the anger of’the working class in the face ofthe attack on their standard ofliving brought about by risingunemployment. Let’s look a1this a bit more closely.

The sexist organization of ati-vanced capitalist society has hat1a profoundly negative impact onthe way workers and others thinkabout themselves in relation tothe social system. For one thing,housework and childcare werenecessary for the reproduction oflabor power, caring for workers’day-to-day needs and raising thenext generation of workers. Butthese activities didn’t producesurplus value for the bosses, so incapitalist terms thev were not

“productive labor,” since thecapitalists consider “producti\.e”onlv that labor which produces ;Iprokt. Capitalist ideology, turn-ing the world on its head as usual,therefore declared that womenwere inherently useless andnaturally dependent on men.

Meanwhile , food, c lothes ,health care, and other t.raditinn;llproducts of “women’s work”were increasingly made by wage

THE STRUGGLE AGAINSTSEXISM

labor (often low-paid women)and bought in the market. Alarge part of the job of the“housewife” was to shop for herfamily: she was to be a “consu-mer” rather than a “producer.”Advertisers pushed new productsand appliances in the name ofhousehold efficiency and a “bet-ter” life through the accumula-tion of material possessions.Szrrp-isingly, many studies from theI92Os on revealed that the averagel ime spenl by the U.S. worna or2lrouscriuol-k remained nearly the same0;~7- a period of at least jifiy years:OTW 50 hours a week.

U.S. President Herbert Hooverdeclared in March, 1929 that “weare a happy people-the statisticsprove it. We have more cars,more bathtubs, oil furnaces, silkstockings, bank accounts thanany other people on earth.” The“model” family of this bosses’fairytale lived comfortably onthe husband’s earnings, with thekids in school and the wifeventuring from home mainly togo shopping. But the most op-pressed women - including, forexample, black women in theU.S. and women workers in thecountries ravaged by imperialism- still had to work both outsideand inside the home. In thefollowing decades, during warand peace, in “good” times and“bad” times, more and morewomen (married and single)were forced to juggle low-paying

jobs and home responsibilities.B y 1 9 8 0 , o n l y 6 % o f U . S .households m a t c h e d t h i s“ model.”

As we will see, women’s ‘tjuggl-ing act” is at the core of sexism incapitalist society. The incorpora-tion of virtually the entire worldinto the capitalist system duringthe era of imperialism has in-c r e a s e d t h e o p p r e s s i o n o fwomen. It has devastated mostbrutally the lives of women aswell as men workers in regionsmost intensely exploited by theimperialists. But it has not“liberated” women in the so-called “advanced” capitalistcountries either.

WOMEN WORKERS INTODAY’S CAPITALISM

Women of the working class inalmost every country of theworld are generally worse offtoday than their great-great-grandmothers were a centuryago, in spite of reforms aimed ati m p r o v i n g c o n d i t i o n s f o rwomen. In the Peruvian high-lands, for example, industriesproducing for export drew work-ers (mostly men} into wage-workand away from food productionfor use rather than for sale. Foodproduction for individual { o rc o m m u n i t y ) u s e ( i n w h i c hwomen had a measure of controlo v e r t h e i r o w n w o r k ) w a sreplaced in rural areas by in-dustrial livestock raising and

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXtSM PAGE 2 I

mechanized agriculture, underthe control of a wealthy, urban-based landowning classdominated by men. Women,too, have now been drawn intoseasonal and part-time wagelabor The standard of living ofmost Indian families has drop-ped. Well over a third of Peruv-ian families are now headed bysingle women, most of whomwork in both subsistence agricul-ture and sporadically for wages,while raising their families alone.Traditional community supportstructures were destroyed, andfew if any social services toreplace them are available forpoor women and their children.

As this example shows, worsen-ing conditions for women work-ers reflect, to a large extent, thedeclining position of the workingclass as a whole as capitalismdevelops in its normal way, creat-ing a tiny, increasingly privilegedruling class side by side with avast impoverished mass of work-ing people. But women of thew o r k i n g c l a s s b e a r a d i s -proportionate burden of this cri-sis. In the U.S., for example, afar greater percentage ofwomenthan of men live in poverty. InThailand, it is common for im-poverished families to send theirdaughters into brothels, wheremany are already dying fromAlDS. While black men in SouthAfrica are drawn to the cities forexploitation as wage laborers,

the women and children in theirfamilies have been forced tor e m a i n b e h i n d i n b a r r e n“homelands” under conditions ofthe harshest poverty.

The political form of capitalismin crisis is fascism, and thegrowth of fascism in the worldtoday is intensifying sexism.Fascism simultaneously revivespre-capitalist forms of the op-pression of women, and createsnew ones. As the example ofNazi Germanyshowed -with itsslogan that women should bcconcerned only with “children,church, and kitchen”-virulentsexism is a hallmark of fascism.

Today, perhaps the main ide-ological form this takes is reli-gious. Christian fascists in L1.S.and Eastern Europe attack birthcontrol and abortion, as well asany call for equality amongwomen and men, under theslogan of “upholding traditionalvalues.” (They even object t.oillustrations in textbooks shnw-ing such horrors as boys knittingor girls fixing cars.) In the Pers-ian Gulf region, Jewish and Isla-mic fascists play the same role.

But notall fascist forms ofsesistideology are religious. For es-ample, in the name of “science,”sociobiology claims to prove,among other ridiculous things,that men are genetically pro-grammed to “play the field” andwomen to monogamy. Other as-

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXISM

pects of fascist culture are evenmore viciously anti-woman.Violence against women of thesort once confined to porno flicksis now found increasingly in“mainstream” popular music(and music videos) and in themovies. Although accuratefigures are hard to come by, realviolence against real women(notably rape and wife-beating)also seems to be on the rise.

Whether in a religious or asecular form, sexist ideologydoes not simply “reflect” the in-creasing actual oppression ofwomen. Rather, it plays an activerole by making this oppressionstem “natural” and therefore en-courages s u c h b e h a v i o r .Furthermore, sexist ideologyfuels fascist mass movements inmany parts of the world.

BOURGEOIS FEMINISMAlTACKS WOMENWORKERS

Bourgeois women have beenaffected by sexism in two oppos-ite ways. On one hand, they oc-cupy a second-class positionwithin their own class. For ex-ample, they are raped, abused bytheir husbands, denied political,economic, and social rights avail-able to men of their class. On theother hand -and this is the mainthing - they also benefit fromthe sexism that (for example)provides them with a cheapsource ofdomestic labor, and that

helps maintain their class com-fortably in power. Occasionallythese women organize underfeminist banners against dis-criminatory laws and practicesthat affect them personally: forexample, the bourgeois SaudiArabian women who demandedthe right to drive their own cars.

S u c h b o u r g e o i s f e m i n i s mrepresents a selfish effort on thepart of women of the ruling classto secure for themselves as in-dividuals an equal “right” tobenefit from the exploitation ofthe working class. In this quest,their opponents are the men oftheir class. Women workersmust resist the calls of bourgeoisfeminists for the “unity of allwomen,” a unity the bourgeoisquickly forget when it comes totheir housekeeper or theirsecretary. Workers must rejectthe fundamental demands ofb o u r g e o i s f e m i n i s m ( m o r ewomen senators, more womenjudges, more women corpora-tion executives), which is theform in which women of the rul-ing class assert their “right” alsoto be “free” to exploit the work-ing class. And workers must alsoreject its individualist and anti-male ideology.

Petit-bourgeois women havehistorically been attracted t obourgeois feminism because itpromotes their own goals of pro-fessional and educational ad-vancement. As the decline o f

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capitalism accelerates, however,and fascism brings an intensifica-tion ofsexism on all fronts, manyof these women mistakenly thinkfeminism is a radical challenge tothe system, rather than what itreally is: a way to advance withinthe system. They are wrong.Feminism is incapable of leadinga serious fight against sexism. Itis less and less able to win el’enthe demands of petit-bourgeoiswomen. It has no answers forworking class women.

One significant example is the“pro-choice” movement in theUnited States, the goal of whichis to uphold the Supreme Court’sRoe v. Wade decision that saidthat states couId not make abor-t ion i l legal . Some of theseactivists correctlv warn that anti-abortion (“pro-l’ife”) is an issueused cynically by right-wingdemagogues (who support im-perialist war, capital punishment,and racist killer cops) to mobilizemass support for fascists of theJesse Helms/David Duke variety.But what kind of movement arethe feminists themselves truingto organize? It is a movementbased ideologically on bourgeoisindividualism (“choice”), notclass interest. Rich women havealways been able to get reasona-bly safe abortions, legal or not.

The main issue in the abortiond e b a t e i s n o t a n a b s t r a c t“woman’s right to control herown body,” but actual access to

adequate health care for theworking class. The main effectof making abortion illegal is thatmore working-class women -especially black women - die inback-alley operations or fromcomplications of self-inducedabortions. But the fight againstracist and sexist cutbacks inhealth care is a bitter class strug-gle against the bosses, for whomthese cutbacks are an essenrialpart of their fascist plan torebuild the competitiveness ofU.S. capitalism at the cost ofworkers’ lives. The feministmovement as such cannot e\.ensupport t.his workers’ struggle,much less lead it, because to do sowould sacrifice the fundamenralfeminist principle of uniting “allwomen.” As the Bolshevik .-\I-exandra Kollontai put it in 1%X,“in a society based on ciass con-tradictions there is no root11 for :iwomen’s m o v e m e n t i Il-

discriminately embracing allwomen.”

The “pro-choice” movementdecided early on to embrace thebourgeois woman rather thanthe woman worker. It is thcre-fore reduced to a strategy ofslickpublic-relations campaigns IOraise money for electoral politics.What a loser! As if any bourgeoispolitician will put the health ofthe workers ahead of the healthof the bosses’ pocketbooks!Meanwhile, fascist-led mobs, un-deterred by governmental au-


thorities, are b lockad ing andf i r e - b o m b i n g c l i n i c s w h e r eabortions are performed. Onlyc o m m u n i s t r e v o l u t i o n - notliberal politicians - can defeatthe bosses’ fascism. By trying tolead women workers into the;n-ms of the “anti-sexist” or “pro-c h o i c e ” p o l i t i c i a n s , l i b e r a lfe m i n i s t s a r e a c t u a l l y~trcngthening the hand of thefascists.

~l‘hc PROGRESSIVE LABOR P.4R-I-l

also rejects more radical-sound-ing formulations that go by then;i~lles of “socialist-feminism” 01“nlarsist feminism.” Sexism isnot a separate system of maletlomination (“patriarchy”) esist-ing side by side with capimlisrn,2.~ these feminists claim. Onlv inrhe reahi of abstraction can theo p p r e s s i o n o f w o m e n b eqarated from the exploitationof the working class.

Feminism in whatever form un-clermines the unity of the work-i ng class by calling into questionrhe possibi l i ty of women andmen working together as com-ratles in the struggle to destroycapitalism and to build egalitar-ian communism. As communistsi\‘c reject this cynical point of\.iew. In our movement we arealread\, b u i l d i n g t h e reaifr iendships and conf idenceamong men and women that poppsychologists and feminists havecalled an impossible dream.

COMMUNISM,NOT FEMINISM,FIGHTS SEXISM

In contrast to the feminists,working c lass women giveleadership in struggles that dochallenge the sexism of thebosses’ system. For esa.mplc, theC o m m u n i s t P a r t y o f P e r u(“Sender0 Luminoso”) attractSmore women than men to itsranks and into the leadership ofits guerrilla movement. “Theidea that all existing governingstructures must be destroyed inorder to rebuild societv from thegrassroots up seems to have spe-cial appeal for women,” as oneobserver put it. In books likeDon? Be Afraid, Cringo, Elvia .21-varado and other Central Amer-ican women explain how theycame to be leaders in thecampesinos struggle against im-perialism. In the U.S., one of thefew militant and successfulstrikes in recent years was that of700 workers , most ly b lackwomen, at the Delta Pride catfishprocessing plant in Indianola,Mississippi. Women are takingthe lead in building the commun-ist P R O G R E S S I V E LABOR PAR-13

from teachers in Oaxaca, Mexicoto hospital workers in Chicago,Illinois, from garment and farmworkers in California to studentsand the unemployed in Detroit,Michigan.

Women workers cannot free


themselves from oppressionwithout taking the lead in therevolutionary communist move-ment to smash capitalism. The“New Democracy” called for bySendero, the “free elections anddemocratic rights” sought bymost “anti-imperialist” mo\z-ments, the economic reformsand the minimum of respect wonby the Delta Pride strikers....none of these will abolish theroots of the special oppression ofwomen workers . The maintheme of this article, then, is thatonly under communism will thepotential exist for full equalit)among women and men. Andwithout a vigorous struggleagainst sexism it would be im-possible to build communistsociety. To fight sexism, womenand men must join and build thePROGRESSIVE L4BOR PART-I’.

HISTORY OF THECOMMUNIST LINEON SEXISM

For nearly a century and a half,communists have struggled withthe so-called “women question.”This section will outhne some ofthe major stages in this process.Of course, there is far more to belearned from the historical ex-periences of our movernenr, andwe should write more on this inthe future.

MARX, ENGELS, ANDTHE FIRST1NTERNATlONAL

Much as was the case wirhMarx’s analysis of racism, hi<ideas on sexism were relati\~cl~~undeveloped even though hiswork provided a solid basis for 3class analysis of the roots c,fwomen’s oppress ion. Threepoints in Capital bear directI>, onthe issue,

l First, consider women’s w o r kin the home. Most of this con-sists of the “reproduction oflat~ II-power”: bearing and raising thenext generation of workers, ;inclfeeding and caring for the prc‘>-ent generation on a daily 11;\5i; \( Ithat it can continue t.o w.ot-k f orthe boss day after da!,. In 3lnrs’\words, “ T h e labor-power N.~I!I-drawn from the market 1)). \\.c:ll-and tear and death must be t-011-

tinually replaced by, at t.hc 1 c! 1least, an equal amount of fIc.tillabor power.” .4s he ~111 it ~‘IYc.-where, “ T h i s reprod~ictic)n (IIlabor power forms, in fit. ;I IIessential of the reproduction I r!capital itself.” So women’s \\.(-i?-Lin the home is an integral pal-t o!’the capitalist system of prC)d~~i--tion. Even though it is not itzclfwage labor, it produces the lal~orpower to be sold for wages.

l Second, labor power is a CC~)I~I-modity and its value is clt-rer-mined as are those of all other

THE STRUGGfE AGAINST SEXISM

commodities, by the amount oflabor socially necessary for itsproduction: i.e., the vaIue ofmeans of subsistence necessaryto maintain the laborer. But,Ltgain quoting Marx, “Taking the\\.orking class as a whole, a por-tion of the means of subsistenceis consumed by members of thefilmily who either do not yetI\-01-k or \~ho have ceased to do‘t-1. ” So l>.e c a n ’ t really irnder-.t;~nd the value of labor po~5-e13,~ ithout taking into ;iccount then;ilure of the family.

.\ particular standard of li\.ingcsists in every country which isi ile reslllt of previous class strug-<lcs. The continuing struggle to:naintAn or improve these living:r;lndal-ds involves such issues as:.\t \vhal age are children fomxi+o begin wage labor, and is thereJo ii\’ age betond w h i c h oldel\ o~.ke~-s LXX esempt? How much

+iinc can a ti’oni3.n spend woi-k-.~lg directly to fulfill her fannilv’s~~eetls, and how much time is she:orce~i to put into low-pa!,ing.wage labor that takes her away;io;n her family? As we will seelater, this has been a point of.harp struggle.

l 11x-s pointed out that when!Il(ore family members work for\\.;lSes, the value of labor poweris depreciated and the rate of es-ploitation increases. This is, ofcourse, what the boss wants.Also, as commodity productionspreads, more items must be

bought, instead of produced bydomestic labor. As a result theincreased total wages the familyreceives from women’s labordoesn’t increase the living stand-ard. All that happens is an ex-pansion of the market forcommodity production. So incapitalism it is capital that bene-fits most from drawing womeninto the wage labor force, sincethe result is greater exploitation,not liberation.

This brings us to the third point.~1s capital grows, it demandsmore labor power, swelling theproletariat. But the drive for sur-plus value forces constant effortsto increase productivity, mostlythrough mechanization, there-fore creating a “relative surpluspopulation” of wage workers.This includes the “industrial res-erve army” or workers withoutwork; as Marx put it, “a mass oftabor power... which cannot getfree from capital.”

1Vomen constitute a block oflabor reservists crucial to theclass struggle precisely becauseof their dual status within thecapitalist system of production.When the bosses no longer needtheir wage labor, women stillhave their “unproductive” andunpaid (but necessary and time-consuming) work at home. In-tensified propaganda to theeffect that “woman’s place is inthe home” exploits women’s owndesires not to drop from exhaus-

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXiSM PAGE 2 7

Con. Women are conflicted:they need the money they arelosing by being laid off, but theyare also glad to have more timefor the work at home. This mini-mizes the fight-back that mightbe expected from mass layoffsand dismissals. Note that thiswould not work nearly as well forthe bosses if men and womenshared the work of the home equ-ally.

Xlarx never drew these threadstogether into a systematic analy-sis of sexism in capitalist society.However, they are the best start-ing-point in communist theoryfor the development of such ananalvsis. Unfortunately, theyhave been overshadowed byEngels’ sketch On fhs 0rig-1’1~ oftheFatly, Private ProperQ, and theStcrtu. -

Engels’ contribution was asignificant historical materialist;inalysis o f t h e p o s i t i o n o fw’omen. Although he was notcorrect in every detail, more rec-ent evidence from anthropologyhns confirmed his general posi-tion. However, Engels’ analysisis; fundamentally flawed by amechanical, rather than dialecti-cal, understanding of material-ism.

Engels effectively demolishedthe two sets of arguments thenused by the bourgeoisie to defendthe inequality of women: rcli-gious ideology adapted from

feudalism, and a newer ideologyclaiming to base itself on biology.What these two positions had incommon was the idea that be-cause women were (in a few res-pects) “made” different frommen, they were inherently infer-ior to men and “had to” play asubordinate role in society.Mouthpieces for the ruling classsupported this argument by try-ing to show that women had “al-ways” been oppressed, accordingto the rule of god and/or “na-ture.” Notice that these samearguments are heard today, inonly slightly varying forms, fromsociobiologists and religiousfundamentalists. Engels coun-tered-based on the work of theearly anthropologist Morgan,and Marx’s notes on Morgan -that the oppression of womenarose with class society.

Despite some glaring weak-nesses in Morgan’s work, Engels’conclusion is supported by betterand more recent studies of non-class societies. Among peoplesuch as the Iroquois as late as the19th century, or the !Kung wellinto the twentieth century, menand w o m e n have b e e nfundamentally equals in societyeven where specific tasks or rit-uals may be gender-specific. Thissuggests strongly that social in-equalities between men and wo-men are due to institutionalizedsexism in class society, enforcedby the state. Did class society.

THE STRUGGLE AGAINSTSEXISM

1lak.e to develop sexism? That and sex oppression are seen asquestion is basically meaning- having fundamentally differentless; the fact is that it did. roots.

I4owever, there are a number ofproblems with The 0tig-k of thxI;hmily Engels shows that the op-pression of women arose alongs-idc private property and thestate, but he does not show howthese developments were rootedin the social relations of produc-t ion. He places far more empha-hi?; on techniques of production,.issurning (as in the “theoryofthcproductive forces”) that relationsof production flow automaticallyfrom a given level of materialproduction. He follows Morganin assuming that”innate” humangreed and competitiveness playXII independent causal role int~i~tory.

1-ngels draws the conclusionr IlLit “modern large-scale in-clllstry,” by pulling women intobocial production, was automa-tmily working toward the equal-ity of the sexes. As we have seen,life was soon to prove him wrong.He also followed the early Cer-~zan Ideology in describing the“biological” and the “social”spheres of human life as quiteclistinct. In this view, the divisionof labor within the family is seenboth as “natural” and as the seedfrom which the social division oflabor - and therefore class soc-iety - developed. This confuseshis main point, and opens thedoor for analyses in which class

When it came to practice, thesocialists of the First Internatio-nal played a respectable role inthe fight against sexism in thelate nineteenth century insofaras they fought for “equal oppor-tunity” for women workers onthe job and in the class struggle.However, their line and practicewere deeply economist and re-formist. They incorrectly be-lieved that capi ta l is tdevelopment would eliminatesexism. They thought that themain aspect of sexism under cap-italism was the exclusion ofworking-class women from par-ticipation in wage labor outsidethe home. They argued that eco-nomic “independence” (i.e., theopportunity to sell their laborpower) would place womenworkers on an equal plane withmen workers. This was the Leftline in the terms of the 19th cen-tury debate on the “woman ques-tion.”

Right-wing feminists acceptedthe stereotype of woman as“domestic” but argued that wo-men were therefore morally sup-er ior and/or had a spec ia l(different, limited) role to play inpublic life. Right-wing trade-unionists attacked women wage-laborers for “taking men’s jobs”and “cheapening the value oflabor” (because bosses paid them


less and thereby drove downwages generally).

But the line of the First Inter-national was very limited non-etheless. It assumed that sexismwas in contradiction to basic ele-ments of capitalism and there-fore could (and would) bedefeated with the refinement ofcapitalism. That is: the FirstInternational saw the fightagainst sexism mainly as abourgeois-democratic reform.They did not see how crucial sex-ism was to capitalist profits.They did not take into accountthat when women worked outs-ide of home, they still ended updoing housework as well - andso, often, they were oppressednlore, not less, by entrance intowage slavery.

THE PERIOD OF THE2ND INTERNATIONAL

By the early 20th century it wasclear to the theorists of theS e c o n d I n t e r n a t i o n a l t h a tcapitalism would not automatic-ally end sexism; that would takea political struggle for socialism.But the anti-sexist struggle (likeother aspects of the work of theSecond International) was un-dermined by its ideology and itsopportunist emphasis on electo-ral politics and reformist tradeunion work.

August Bebel’s massive 1879book Woman and Socialism set the

theoretical terms of the socialistdebate on the question for thisperiod. It had tremendous influ-ence largely because it was one oft h e v e r y f e w w o r k s t h a tattempted to set forward adetailed vision of what socialismwould be like. As such, it alsodemonstrated the commitmentof German social democracy -then the bastion of the move-ment - to organizing amongwomen. Bebel denounced thespecific oppression of womenunder capitalist society, holdingthis up as a powerful example ofwhy workers (especially, but notexclusively women workers)need socialism.

But where Engels merely con-fused the issue of whether theoppression of women was rootedfirmly in class society or in anindependent historical develop-m e n t o f t h e f a m i l y , B e b e lthoroughly muddled it with hiscommitment to the right-wingposition. He based himself onthe “two spheres” argument,identifying the relations withint h e f a m i l y - p a r t i c u l a r l ywomen’s dependence on men-as the root of sexist oppression.He saw the issue of women’sliberation mainly as a strugglefor individual independence.(Some “socialist-feminist” the-orists of the late twentieth cen-tury would later pick up thisrightwing Social-Democraticideology enthusiastically.)

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXlSM

Bcbcl recognized that the legalequality demanded by bourgeoisLzminists was not enough; econo-uric equality was also needed..-ind he insisted that only “social-I?;I~” would (in the distant future)mlve the problem. But Bebel’s“socialism,” like that of EdwardBellamy in Looking Backward, washsed on a petit-bourgeois visionof a society in which everyonei\.ouid be “free and independentcquds, ” rather than interdepen-(lent members of an egalitarianc.ollective. So he was not able, in:lw end, to analyze the so-called

“woman question” in a way sub-stantially different from liberalfeminism. And he implied thatwomen would have to struggleagainst sexism virtually withoutthe help of men of their class.

Eleanor Marx and EdwardAveling’s pamphlet The WomanQuestim continued in the samevein of identifying the “socialstruggle” (against capitalism)and the struggle for women’sequality as parallel movements,not as aspects of the same move-ment. Nor did they make muchprogress toward bridging the

Clara Zetkin (left) with Frederick Engels at her side and AugustBebel during the International Socialist Workers’ Conference,

Zurich, I893

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXKM PAGE 3 I

gap between utopian visions of adistant egalitarian future, and“practical” short-range strugglesfor political rights under capital-ism.

What about socialist practice?\Vomen counted for about 16%of the German Social DemocraticParty (SPD) in the early twen-tieth century-a higher percent-age than anywhere else. TheSPD’s consistent fight for wo-men’s suffrage and for lawsagainst overt sexist discrimina-tion, although thoroughly re-formist, had built a basis for alarge socialist women’s move-Inent. Within this movement,Clara Zetkin was the main the-oretical voice against the SPD’sreformist position; she eventu-ally sided with Lenin and theBolsheviks when the Second In-ternational split, and became anenthusiastic supporter of theSoviet Union.

From 1896 on, Zetkin took theimportant step ofbreaking downthe “woman question” on thebasis of social class: sexismmeant quite different things forbourgeois women than it did forwomen of the working class. Un-like bourgeois women, she noted,proletarian women were alreadypart of social production, victimsof capitalist super-exploitation.The oppression of women was1101 eternal, as Bebel had sug-gested, but (as Engels had said)grounded in particular historical

developments.

Based on her class analysis ofsexism, Zetkin concluded thatthe main aspect of socialist workon the “woman question” had tobe socialist organizing amongworking women. Her main em-phasis was on organizing womenon the job, but she recognizedthat many (if not most) womenworked in situations that madethis difficult (for example, as ser-vants in private households,piece-work laborers in domesticproduction, or in small-scale ag-riculture). So she also called forwork among women in theirneighborhoods.

At least in later years, she strug-gled against the tendency amongSPD women to make issues ofmarriage, love and sexuality themain topic of discussion inwomen’s study circles.

But Zetkin sometimes roman-ticized the position of womenwithin the family, in the pre-cap-italist epoch and within the work-ing class of her own day. She paidlittle serious attention to the“double shift” of women workers- apart from the practical dif-ficulties it created in winningthem to be politically active -and less still to the proletarianwoman who did not work outsidethe home. In effect, she one-sidedly downplayed the partic-ularities of the oppression ofworking class women, assuming

THE STRUCGIE AGAINST SEXISM

that a general analysis of capital-ism alone would provide the an-swers.

Like Zetkin, the Russian social-ist Alexandra Kollontai foughtfor a class line on sexism. Herbook The Social Basis of the Woman(h&m (1909) carried out thel:ft-wing socia l is t s t ruggleagainst revisionism in the con-test of the debate over the op-pression of women. Its mainrherne was an attack on bour-geois feminism, which had begunto make some headway amongi\‘omen of the working class. Itcnlphasized t h a t f e m i n i s mlought for “equal rights” onlywithin the framework of capital-ist oppression; it offered nothingLO the proletarian woman. The11 Oman worker “is her own savi-0~11~; her future is in her ownhnnds.” The socialist movementwould be the vehicle for Lhis5t ruggle.

i<ut Kollontai made more of ancfinrt than Zetkin to use Marx-ihlil to analyze the special oppres-Sic_)n ofwomen. “For women, the5olution of the family question is110 less important than the;Ichie\,ement of political equalityand economic independence.”This question, too, had a classcharacter . F o r b o u r g e o i sLvomen, the answer lay in“isolated, heroic efforts of in-dividuals”: defiance of family2nd convention in the pursuit of“free love.” For proletarian

women, in contrast, “the ques-tion of relationships would ceaseto be such a painfui one . . . onlyif society relieved women of allthose petty household careswhich are at present unavoidable(given the exis tence of in-dividual, scattered domesticeconomies)” and socialized childcare.

U n l i k e b o u r g e o i s s o c i a lreformers who tried to dream up

Alexandra Kollontai in I9 10


new forms of the family and ofmarital relations out of their ownimaginations, the proletarianwomen were “waging war ag-ainst the factors that are behindthe modern form of marriageand family. In striving to changefundamentally the conditions oflife,” she continued, “they arealso helping to reform rela-tiouhips between the sexes.”

-1‘0 accomplish this, human psy-c.hology would have to chancgedramatically, overcoming “thatdeeply rooted sense of propertythat demands possession notonly of the body but also of thesoul of another.” The “life of thecollective” would have to replace“the individual’s petty personal.joys.” Abolition of the existingsocial system was a prerequisiteto this sort of transformation,which Kollontai recognizedwould also require conscious ide-ological struggle.

Kollontai was a vigorous andprincipled fighter for socialismthroughout the 19 1 OS, joiningthe Bolsheviks in 1915 and soonbecoming the only woman com-rade on the Central Committee.She was thus able to try to putsome of these ideas into practice.

WOMEN INSOVIET RUSSIAJust a year after the Bolshevik

Revolution, the busy Lenin made

a surpriseappearance at the FirstAU-Russia Congress of WorkingWomen. “The experience of allliberation movements has shownthat the success of a revolutiondepends on how much the wo-man takes part in it,” he toldthese comrades of “the women’ssection of the workers’ army.”

He pointed with pride to thefact that “for the first time inhistory, our law has removedeverything that denied womenrights .” These legal reformsmade divorce readily available,eliminated distinctions betweenbabies born in and out of marri-age, permitted abortion, gavewomen political rights (such asthe vote), and generally endor-sed the concept of “equal pay forequal work.”

But more important to Leninwas the struggle against customs(backed by religion) that still keptmany women enslaved. And wo-men would only be “completelyemancipated” when small peas-ant farms had been replaced by“cooperative farming” using“collective methods.” WhileLenin did not explain this in de-tail, he was clearly indicating thatthe roots of women’s oppressionwere in the economic systembased on private property - andnot, as the rightwing SocialDemocrats believed, in an auton-omous “family.”

Eight months later, Lenin was

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXlSM

emphasizing the need for farmore sweeping changes in thesocial relations of production.“Notwithstanding all the lawsemancipating woman, she con-tinues to be a domestic slave,” hewrote, “because petty houseworkcrushes, strangles, stultifies, anddegrades her, chains her to thekitchen and nursery. . . . The realemancipation of women,” hecontinued, “real communism,will begin only where and whenan all out struggle begins (led bythe proletariat wielding the statepower) against this petty house-keeping, or rather when itswholesale transformation into alarge-scale socialist economybegins.” In practical terms, itwas necessary to “take propercare of the shoots of commun-is m” represented by creches(public nurseries), kinder-gartens, stolovye (public diningrooms) and so forth.

This formulation of the prob-lem was very significant. It rec-o g n i z e d t h a t t h e s p e c i a loppression of women within thehome was not simply (or evenmainly) a question of male dom-ination. The Bolsheviks had tak-en seriously the famous (ifperhaps misleading) slogan,“within the family, he is thebourgeoisie, she is the prolet-ariat.” They had attempted tosmash the family equivalent ofstate power with the laws andideological campaigns around

freedom of divorce, marriage,and childbearing. Now Lenincould see that these measures,while necessary, had not cut tothe root of the problem. He ex-plicitly recognized that the lib-eration of women from specialoppression depended fund-amentally on the reorganizationof production on a thoroughlysocial basis.

In this speech, Lenin was pro-moting exactly the program ofAlexandra Kollontai, who was, asthe first communist Minister ofSocial Welfare, responsible forthese and other activities. Be-tween 1918 and 1920 the Sovietwomen’s bureau (Zhenotdel) be-came increasingly active, underthe direction first of Inessa Arm-and and later of Kollontai.Leaders like Lenin and Sverdlovsupported it, but there was con-siderable resistance amongmany of the Bolshevik men,some of whom ridiculed it andcalled for its abolition; the ide-ologica1 struggle in the partyagainst sexism was clearly at alow level.

At first Zhenotdel concentratedon winning women workers tosupport Soviet power and to helpin the civil war and in socialistconstruction. Most of its workwas educational, although it didplay the key role in formulatingthe decree that legalized abor-tion in 1920. Kollontai tried toexpand its role to work for pro-


grams specifically aimed at im-proving the position of women.Every one of these - from theorganization of peasant womento a campaign to fight prostitu-tion with job training to calls forefforts to win more women intoleadership positions - met withstubborn resistance within theparty and its leading bodies, aswell as among the masses. Thefight against sexism demandedan intensified political struggleover the line of the movement.Socialism was not automaticallymaking women and men equal.

However, the end of the periodof “war communism” and thestart of the New Economic Policymarked a major setback. Kol-lontai became part of the “Work-ers’ Opposition” to NEP, arguingthat promotion of capitalist rel-ations of production - even un-der communist supervision -was an unprincipled and unwar-ranted compromise with the classenemy. (Her practical alternativeto NEP increased power for in-dependent trade unions at theexpense of the party-dominatedstate apparatus, was no solutioneither; but that is another story.)

Kollontai turned to fiction todramatize the bad effects thatNEP would have, especially onwomen workers. In the storySoon (In 48 Years’ Time) she en-visions a scene in 1970 in whichthe children of “Commune Ten”are asking veterans ofthe revolu-

tion about the old days. (,, We sawmoney in a museum. Did youhave money, grand-dad?” oneasks.) The sketch is a brief butappealing description of thecommunist world that Kollontaibelieved (or at least hoped) couldhe realized within the lifetime ofmany of her readers.

Kollontai wrote fairly exten-sively on the future of the familyand relations between the sexesunder socialism and commun-ism. She recognized that thetransformation of houseworkand childrearing into social fimc-tions was already abolishing thefamily as an economic unit: “Thefamily is withering away not be-cause it is being forciblydestroyed by the state but be-cause the family is ceasing to bea necessity . . In place of the oldrelationship between men andwomen, a new one is developing:a union of affection and com-radeship, a union of two equalmembers of communistsociety. .. In place of the individual andegoistic family, a great universalfamily ofworkers will develop, inwhich all the workers, men andwomen, will above all be com-rades.”

Kollontai’s views on these ques-tions were not taken seriously byher own comrades. For thosewho did not see clearly the con-nections between economic or-ganization of society and theideology it sustzins and which

IWE SlRiJGGLE AGAlNST SEXlsM

sustains it, or did not grasp theplace of the family within the so-cial relations of production, herconcerns seemed frivolous. Forthose (and they were many) withonly the most superficial grasp ofsexism, her ideas seemed out-landish and even dangerous.Her opposition to NEP and herinvolvement with the “Workers’Opposition” in the early 1920shelped to isolate her from Partyleadership.

And as Soviet socialism becameincreasingly bogged down in na-tionalism, the “theory of the pro-duct ive forces ,” and othercapitalist elements, progress to-ward equality of the sexes alsoslowed down and eventually wasreversed. Kollontai had long agorealized that fruitfuI speculationabout the future had to be basedon actual experience of the wor-king class transforming theworld; she no longer saw aroundher the basis for further specula-tion. And she did not have en-ough confidence in her ability asa theorist to attempt to formulatea thoroughgoing critique.

Nonetheless, the dictatorshipof the proletariat did enable Sov-iet women to win freedomswhich feudal and capitalist dic-tatorships had always deniedthem. In fact it was only the dic-tatorship of the proletariat thatallowed the Second Interna-tional’s dream that women, likemen, should be “free and in-

dependent equals” to be realizedto such a great extent - eventhough the Second Internationalhad opposed the dictatorship ofthe proletariat. Only the dic-tatorship of the proletariat couldrealize the dreams of bourgeoisand petit-bourgeois feminists for“free love” and political equal-ity-even though the bourgeoisfeminists had bitterly opposedthe dictatorship of the prolet-ariat.

Peasant women, Muslim wo-men, those who had been chain-ed by the traditions of feudalism,broke those chains in a few shortyears. Women of Uzbekistan,mobilized by red women organ-izers, got up off the floor andburned their veils. They, and wo-men workers, quickly found joband educational opportunitiesthat few had ever dreamed of.They came forward by the thous-ands to take leadership in build-ing a society in which womenachieved greater equality withmen than had ever existed any-where in the capitalist world.These accomplishments must beremembered and celebrated.They are an inspiration to us all.

Butjust as socialism did not leadto egali tarian communism,neither could it abolish sexism.In the name of socialism, Sovietfactories in the 1920s churnedout cosmetics so that every peas-ant girl would be as privileged as

THE STRUGGLE AGANST SEXISM PAGE 37

a western lady - reinforcingbourgeois stereotypes and ex-pectat ions of womanhood,rather than challenging them.In the name of nationalism, the“motherhood” campaign of the1930s drove abortion under-ground again and offered mone-tary bonuses to women bearingmore than six children - ande\cn greater ones to those withmar-c than ten children. As soc-ialism was built, step by step, Sov-ier w’omen f o u n d themsel\.esonce again trapped in the dualrole of wage worker and unpaidh~~ri~ernaker. T h e s e x i s m o fbourgeois society was rep-rocluceci along with the othercapitalist social relations thatcharacterize socialism.

WOMEN AND THE GPCROne strength of the Commun-

ist Party of China was that, from1 he start., it organized womenw~orkers, intellectuals, and cspcc-ially peasants, on a mass basis.\Vomen in the Liberated Areaswere no longer chattel, but com-rades and leaders. Women, equ-ally with men, received land oftheir own in the great land-re-form distributions. No moregirls had their feet deliberatelycrippled. The widespread prac-tice of female infanticide wassuppressed. Collective strugglewas encouraged, and backed bystate power, against the oppres-sion of women by male relatives.

Most significantly, however, thePeople’s Commune movementof 1958 began fundamentalchanges in relations of produc-tion and distribution that had ahuge potential for carryingthrough the anti-sexist struggle.As many women told the com-munist reporter Anna LouiseStrong in 1959, “With Liberationwe received legal and politicalequality, but only this past yeardid we attain real equality withthe coming of the commune.”

Wages for work in the com-mune were paid directly to thewoman worker, not into thehands of her in-laws as had beenthe case even in the cooperativefarms. Girls and women wereallowed and even encouraged tolearn jobs once reserved formales. More important, a hugenetwork of child-care institutionsand communal dining facilitiesallowed women to work on closeto the same basis as men. Equalpay thus went beyond a legalformal ism to become morenearly a reality. And womenreported that relations betweenhusbands and wives were betternow that the most common sour-ces of friction had been removed.“Since 1 don’t have to cook any-more, Fan and I go to meetingsand study together,” explainedone young mother.

Finally and most crucially, thePeople’s Communes began to

THE STRUGGLE AGAlNST SEXISM

implement distribution accord-ing to need instead of accordingto work. The most common“free things” were food, matern-ity c a r e , nurser ies ,kindergartens, schools, andhousing for the elderly. Evenmore than “equal pay,” thisworked to equalize the positionsof women and men. For exam-ple, a woman in advanced pregn-ancy could not hope to produceas much as a healthy young man;under even the fairest wage sys-tem, women had to choosebetween childbearing and max-imizing her economic security.Under the communist “supplysystem,” she did not.

The Party, already dominatedby right-wingers, quickly beganto limit the Commune move-ment. “Wages must take firstplace,” according to a partydecree in December 1958, andmust “increase faster than thesystem of free supply.” The classstruggle sharpened: betweenthose who wanted to move morerapidly to communism and thosewho wanted to maintain capital-ist relations in the name of“socialism.” Later the defeat ofthe Left in the Great ProletarianCultural Revolution, and thesharp turn back toward capital-ism, marked a major setback foranti-sexism and soon reversedmuch of the progress that hadbeen made. No more “freethings” but instead reliance on

wages; no promotion of commu-nal effort, but instead reliance onprofitability. Women especiallyquickly lost ground.

The effects of this reversal wentfurther. For example, China hadsuccessfully limited excessivepopulation growth during the195Os, in spite of phenomenalimprovements in life expectancy,by means of education and pohti-cal struggle. By the 1970s thegovernment’s approach had tochanged: now it tried to controlthe birth rate by legal limitationson family size, enforced witheconomic penalties. Since manyfamilies still value boys morehighly than g i r l s (an ideareinforced by the institutionalsexism in Chinese soc ie ty)female infanticide has again be-come common. Another exam-ple suggests the intimate finksbetween sexism, racism, andcapita l ism: Western-s ty le“beauty” contests are now pro-moting the view of women ascommodities, not comrades.The Umost beautiful” are judgedto be those with the most Eu-ropean features.

The working women and menof China will not permit thisdesecration to endure. A com-mune member in Shantungwrote in 1958, “We fear norheaven nor earth/For a thousandfamilies/Have become one fam-ily.” We have much to learn fromthe Chinese revolution as well as


from its mistakes.

DEVELOPMENT OF THELINE OF THE PLP

In February, 3971, PL hlagaz-ine (Vol. 8, #l) published “‘l’heP o l i t i c a l E c o n o m y o f XlaleChauvinism” in response to therise of a bourgeois feministmovement in the United States.1\%ile the feminists concentralcdon psycliological aspects of scs-ism, the PI, article discussed indetail the ways that mnlc-chauvinist ideology is used by I hccapitalists to justify the exploirn-t ion of women workers . Itattacked the feminist analysis of“the nuclear family” as thesupposed basis of sexist oppres-sion. It proposed instead (a)fighting sexism on the job, the“economic profit base of malechauvinism”; and (b) strugglingfor anti-sexism and collect i\,ityaround housework, childrearing,etc. in family and neighborhoodcontexts.

This piece concluded that sex-ism could only be abolished aftera long struggle under socialism,but it was framed and argued ina thoroughly reformist way.Also, it said almost nothing eitherabout the actual work of theParty or about the particular rolethe Party should play in the lightagainst sexism.

In 1980 the PLP published apamphlet, “Smash Sexism in

Garment” (also in PL Magazine,Vol. 13, #4). This was importantbecause it represented a serious(and almost isolated) effort to in-tegrate the fight against sexisminto a general communist pro-gram. It correctly focused onwomen as workers, rather thanwomen’s reproductive lives (asmost feminists were then doing).Perhaps its greatest strength wasthat it drew on experiences of-comrades who were organizingamong women workers. It con-tains a great deal of useful in-formation and analysis, antishould be read bv comrades andfriends today. ’

The piece t ricd LO analyze borhthe oppression of women wit binthe home and the exploitation ofwomen’s labor in capitalist pro-duction, but did not do sosuccessfully. For example, itmakes a false distinction betweenfighting “sexism in practice”(meaning on-t.he-job) and “sexistideology” (including the or-ganization of unpaid work in thehousehold). This is wrong onseveral counts. First, whenwomen workers come homefrom their paid jobs to hoursmore of housework and childcare, this is as much sexism “inpract ice” as i s the smal lerpaycheck they received from theboss. Second, to separate thefight against sexist ideology fromo n - t h e - j o b s t r u g g l e s i s a neconomist (or reformist) error.


WOMEN ANDLEADERSHIP

One strength of the work ofPLP in fighting sexism has beenour relative success in develop-ing women workers as partyleaders. This has been due inpart to the recognition that theworking class needs such leaders,b u t m o r e t o t h e p r o f o u n dreformulation of the concept ofleadership that we have helped tobring to the communist move-ment.

All too often in the past, leader-ship was seen in a formalistic waythat reflected reformist and op-portunis t errors . “Leaders”were people who gave publicspeeches , wrote theoret ica ldocuments, held official posi-tions in unions or political part-ies , d irected s tr ike tact ics ,commanded armies. They werethe “few” leading the “many”.Some were women, but mostwere men.

But from a communist point ofview, leaders of the working classare those who take on themselvesthe responsibility of advancingthe class struggle. This is shownmainly by winning those aroundthem to a deeper ideological un-derstanding of capitalism andcommunism, and to action basedon that understanding. For ex-ample, a woman worker withstrong ties to her co-workers,

who sells Chatige to them andstruggles with them over theParty’s ideas but who has littleexperience in physical conflictand hesitates to speak over abullhorn, is much more of a lea-der than, say, a man worker whowill give speeches and is willingto lead the charge against a fascistrally but who will not build apolitical base. The working classneeds many, many leaders - notjust a few. In the future, as webuild communist society, allworkers will become leaders.

The main way that sexism hasheld back the development ofcommunist leadership is not thatsexism has created objective andsubjective obstacles to womentaking on specific traditionally“male” responsibilities. It hascertainly done this, and these ob-stacles can and must be over-come. But the more significantimpact of sexism has been thatcrucia l tasks of communistleadership (such as getting toknow people individually andwell, and taking responsibilityfor their development) havebeen stereotyped as “female”and thereby devalued, just as“women’s work” in the home isdevalued in capitalist terms.

B e c a u s e o f t h i s n e w u n -derstanding of leadership, thePLP has been able to recognizethe crucia l leadership thatwomen give today and mostlikely gave in the past (without

THE STRUGGLE AGAtNST SEXKM PAGE 41

acknowledgement). It is wrongto say that women have historic-ally been “passive” in the classstruggle, even relative to men.This is as much of a lie as thebosses’ stereotypes of workers as“stupid” or black people as“lazy.” The sharper we are onthis question, the better we willbe able to build the confidence inthemselves than women need inorder to overcome subjective ob-stacles to doing the political taskst r a d i t i o n a l l y i d e n t i f i e d a s“male.” This, in turn, will helpo u r w o m e n c o m r a d e s a n dfriends to confront the sexismthey encounter in relationshipswith male family members,friends, and comrades.

ONLY COMMUNISMCAN SMASH SEXISM

The PLP “Smash Sexism”pamphlet could not provide asatisfactory analysis of sexismbecause the PLP was still follow-ing the mistaken general line of“fight for socialism.” Socialism,even in the best ofcircumstanccs,maintains wage labor. It is there-fore incapable of ending sexism.

Soviet communist leaders likeLenin and especially Kollontaicame close to grasping this point,but failed to see its significance.When Lenin referred to “theemancipation of women, realc o m m u n i s m ” i n 1 9 1 9 , h ecorrectly recognized that the twoare inseparable - but soon con-

eluded that both would have towait, as “war communism” wasset aside for the NEP Kollontaicorrectly disagreed with thispolicy, but could offer nothingmore concrete than a vague callfor a “forced advance to com-munism” in its place. The line oft h e P R O G R E S S I V E L A B O RPARTY offers for the first time inhistory a program for “theemancipation of women, realc o m m u n i s m ” immediate lyfollowing the seizure of power bythe working class.

Under communism, the fruitsoflabor outside the home will notbe alienated from the workingclass by a parasitic elite. Theworking class as a whole willshare what the working class pro-duces. Men and women wiI1share all tasks inside and outsidethe home. And the distinctionbetween “home” and “society”will be abolished as communistsociety makes it the responsibil-ity of all to provide as best we canfor all our members. “We” willcome to mean, not “Mr. and Mrs.Gomez and their biologicalof fspr ing,” or even “al l usJohnsons,” but “we the inter-national working class.”

The remaining pages of thisarticle will develop these ideas inmore detail.


THE NATUREOF SEXISMIN CAPITALIST SOCIETY

How is capitalism organizedaround the inequality of men andwomen? To put this in anotherway, what is the contradictionthat defines sexism in capitalistsociety? It is the contradiction ofjvomen workers’ dual role in thesystem o f p r o d u c t i o n asbornemakers, on one hand, and:vage laborers, on the other.

One aspect of this contradictionIs that women are expected toshoulder the lioness’s share of thelabor involved in reproducingthe labor force. That is, they arethe primary producers of laborpower. In working class families,this is not wage labor but produc-tion for individual consumptionwithin the home. Here, womenworkers appear primarily as“women” and their work isportrayed as a “natural” exten-sion of the biological functions ofchildbearing and lactation.

The other aspect of this con-tradiction is that these samewomen form a steadily increas-ing part of the wage labor forceand an even larger portion of the“ r e s e r v e a r m y o f t h e u n -employed” that also continues togrow as capitalism advancesdeeper and deeper into crisis.Here women workers appearprimarily as “workers” engaged,

like other workers, in commodityproduction.

Why are these two aspects ofwoman’s place in capitalism con-tradictory and not complement-ary? To put it another way, whydoes “woman” stand in opposi-tion to “worker”? Simply put,because under capitalism, com-modity production stands in op-position to production for use.

Which is the main aspect of thecontradiction? In capitalism,women’s oppression within thefamily is a structural part of thecapitalist system. That svstem’smain contradiction, however, isbetween employer and wage-worker . Therefore , womenworkers’ participation in wagelabor is the main aspect of thecontradiction defining sexismunder capitalism. Their role inthe household portion of the eco-nomy is the secondary aspect.

Wage labor under capitalism is“alienated” labor. This does notjust mean that it is organized tobe boring or that most of what isproduced is garbage. Rather, itmeans specifically that the pro-ducts of the workers’ labor are“alienated” or owned not bythem, but by the capitalists forwhom they work. Workers donot work for themselves as aclass, but for the bosses as a class.

Work in the home for one’sfamily is not wage labor, and the


capitalists generally do not ownthe product of this work, which islabor power itself. This laborpower remains (literally) in thehands of the working class but ituse useless to the workers (whol a c k t o o l s , m a c h i n e s , r a wmaterials, and other means ofproduction) until they can sell itto some capitalist. The capitalistthen owns the labor power andall it produces. So domestic laborfor one’s own family is not al-ienated labor.

How women experience thiscontradiction depends largely ontheir class. Historically and inthe present, the women mosteager to work outside of thehome have been those (1) whoseclass background gave them ashot at non-proletarian (andtherefore non-alienated) work,such as the private practice ofmedicine; and (2) who generallyhired other women (mainly, inthe U.S., black women) to do thed o m e s t i c w o r k o f t h e i rhousehold anyway-and had tocope with the results of the al-ienation of these workers. In theU.S., for example, white petit-bourgeois women have struggledto spend more time in outsidework, while mouthpieces of thebourgeoisie have done their bestto get them to go home and makemore white babies.

The situation is different for theworking class woman. In someways she would often prefer to

“do” for her own family than towork for some boss. A blackKentucky woman explaineddescribed how domestic workersin her neighborhood held “day-off-get-togethers” every Thurs-day. “That was hard work, butpeople didn’t mind because theywanted to do that and they wereworking for themselves. Now,they didn’t work any harder forthe white woman. As a matter offact, they didn’t work as hard forwhite people as they did for the-mselves.” Wage labor - alienat-ing in a psychological as well asin an economic sense - couldeasily be seen, even by womenthemselves, as a distraction from“their” work in the home -which had to be done in any case.Yet a woman who did not earnwages might easily find herselfuncomfortably dependent on aman. If he abused her, orpursued other women, she wouldhave little recourse. Either situa-tion was especially acute if thewoman had young children.

Women workers as individualsoften had little choice as to howthey would resolve the contradic-tion of sexism in their own lives.As earlier examples have shown,they might be prohibited by theirfather, husband, or brother, or bylaw itself, from taking a job. Aboss might refuse to hire them,or a union official might denythem membership necessary towork in a closed shop.

THE STRUGGLE AGAMVST SEXKM

On the other hand, economicnecessity or even physical brutal-ity might force them into (low)-paying work.

For example, a black migrant toChicago around 1916 reportedthat in his native Mississippi, “awoman was not permitted toremain at home if she felt like it.If she was found at home some ofthe white people would come toask why she was not in the fieldand tell her she had to get to thefield or else abide by the con-sequences. After the summercrops were all in, any of the whitepeople could send for any Negrowoman to come and do the fam-ily washing at 75 cenrs to $1 .OO aday.”

Therefore the question of howto resolve the contradictions ofsexism has always been, for thewoman worker if not for thebourgeois lady, mainly depen-dent on collective struggle. Twostrategies have already beenmentioned. The first was todraw women fully into the wagelabor force, hoping in this way tonegate their special oppressionwithin the family. The secondwas to withdraw women fullyfrom the wage labor force, hop-ing in this way to eliminate thedouble burden they shouldered.Both solutions were mechanical;both were essentially gearedtoward reform within capitalism;as we have seen, neither worked.

But the failures of these strateg-ies were not merely tactical; theywere political as well. The firstdownplayed or even denied theneed for a conscious struggleagainst sexism. The second,accepting as “given” a profounddivision of labor within the work-ing class, inadvertently plantedand replanted the seeds of in-equality and therefore disunity.Where there is no equality of thesexes within the family, womenfeel that “their” work is alienat-ing, even if no capitalist is actu-ally profiting from it. They seeonly their husbands as their op-pressors. At the same time, byaccepting and perpetuating theidea that each wage-earnerought ideally to take individualresponsibihty for his household,workers reinforce both the ideo-logy of individualism and thestructure of modern capitalism.

Two other strategies for fight-ing sexism can be re jec tedquickly. S o m e “socialist-feminists” have called for thegovernment to pay “wages forhousework” to resolve the con-tradiction between (male) wagework outside the home and(female) unpaid work in thehome. This is ridiculous. Wagesare the price of labor power;once bought, that labor powerbelongs to the buyer. Whatworking class woman wouldwant government oflicials dictat-

TM STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXISM PAGE 45

ing how she should spend her around which work is organizedtime on housework? All these on the basis of sexual inequality.“socialist-feminists” are really as- As with the eradication of racism,king for is a government hand- this takes an intense politicalout, on the order of an extra tax struggle to win masses of womendeduction - hardly a radical and men workers to carry outdemand. anti-sexist work.

Others, including some of ourcomrades, think the answer tosexism is for husbands and wivesto share housework equally. Ofcourse they should sharehousework, but that’s no strategyto smash sexism. It doesn’t speakat all to the problems of singlew o m e n (wi th o r w i thoutchildren). And it doesn’t addressthe essence ofsexism in capitalistsociety.

How, then, can women workersfree themselves from wage slav-ery, if not by withdrawing fromthe labor market? Only bydestroying capitalism itself, in-cluding every remnant of thewage system.

This struggle has already begunwithin our movement andamong workers with whom ourParty has influence. But afterthe revolution, commanding allthe resources of the workers’state, the Dictatorship of the Pro-letariat, we will be able to wagethis fight on a far, far, far, broaderscale. It will be a qualitativelydifferent situation: state poweris the weapon we need to win thestruggle against sexism. The ex-periences of the Soviet and Chin-e s e c o m m u n i s t s , h o w e v e rlimited, provide a glimpse of howthis will work.

WOMEN INCOMMUNIST SOCIETY

Since sexism is fundamentallyan aspect of capitalist society, theabolition of capitalist economicrelations (in both the “public”and the “private” spheres) willabolish sexism as it now exists.But that is not as simple as itsounds, because an importantpart of destroying capitalistrelations will be to identify andeliminate all specific ways

The main task of the proletar-ian state will be the immediateabolition of wage labor and themarket economy. Distributionwill be based on need. Womenwill not be dependent on men foreconomic survival, whether ornot they have small children,whatever their skills. Nor willwomen be impoverished as sin-gle heads of households. Nowoman will have to seek or toavoid a pregnancy in order tosecure her economic position orthat of her other children. Nowoman (or man) will be forcedinto prostitution - nor into

THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXlsM

marriage.

Because women have so farborne most of the responsibilityfor homemaking and childcare,women workers will have theskills necessary to organize thetransformation of these tasksinto social functions.

Contrary to the practice of boththe Soviets and the Chinese, thisdoes not mean that women(virtually alone) will continue toperform these tasks in newsettings. Rather, women com-rades will take the lead in winn-ing both men and womenworkers to learn to do thingstogether - running nurseries,public laundries, heavy cleaningservices, dining halls, etc. - inthe new way. Most people will domore than one kind of work, andboth women and men will be en-couraged to learn skills tradition-ally reserved for the other sex.

Past experience, variations instrength, dexterity, etc. amongthe workers will not result in dif-fferential standards of living.

Ending commodity production(the market) will help to underm-ine bourgeois values andattitudes. We will learn to seeo ther p-eople ( includingmembers of the opposite sex) ascomrades, not as vendors of sex-ual and/or emotional services,not as commodities to be “shop-ped” for or “sold” for a dowry.We will learn to value our work

and that of others not for itsmarket price (“a good salary”)but as a contribution to the col-lective good. Gone, for example,will be the invidious distinctionbetween “housework” and “realwork.”

Changing social reletions of pro-duction will not automaticallyeliminate sexist &oiogy or attitudes;in th4 future, as now, there wiU haveto be a political struggl47 to win th4mass of ma and women work8rs lo acommunist und.erstanding of sexismand to the goal of an egalitariansociety. This is a key part of the cen-tral task of thx party: winning theworking class to fight for commun-ism. We will continue to pay spe-cial attention to the developmentof women workers as comradesand leaders in all areas of thework of the party.

We will use movies, music, art,literature, and all other forms ofcultural expression, as well asnewspapers, meetings, and otherformal political activities, to fightsexist ideas and stereotypes andto win the working class (and es-pecially the youth) to an egalitar-ian communist commitment toequality of the sexes. We willstruggle against and suppressanti-woman “entertainment,”just as we will suppress racism.Violent sexist attacks will declineas men of the working class joinwith women to fight the realenemy, capitalism, and as anegalitarian way of life engenders

THE STRUGGLE AGAlNST SEXISM PAGE 47

comradeship and self-respect.

But when they do occur theywill not be tolerated: rape, wifeabuse, and sexual harassmentwill not be treated as subjects forjokes but as attacks on the unityof the working class. Anti-work-ing class violence - includingviolent sexist attacks - will bemet with the organized violenceof the proletarian state.

We do not know how long it willbe, how many years or how manygenerations, until sexist ideologywill seem as quaintly and pro-foundly wrong as the flat-earththeory, and sexism itself asappallingly and unimaginablywrong as, say, cannibalism, W edo know that attitudes canchange surprisingly fast whenwomen and men workers areunited in struggle against the op-pressors-and especially whenthey hold the vital weapon ofstate power. Communism can bewon. The fight against sexismcan be won. It will be won-however long it takes.

THE PROGRAMOF THE PLPl Fight for communism as the

only basis for destroying sexism.

aBuild a base among men andwomen workers around this line;struggle against male chauvinistideology and sexist practicesamong Party members and ourfriends.

@Put special emphasis on or-ganizing among women; con-tinue the struggle to developwomen, especially women work-ers oppressed by racism, inleadership.

NI’hink and write about ways inwhich sexism affects the workersin our base, and how we are try-ing to fight it; make sure that allour literature reflects our line onfighting sexism.

*Get involved in strugglesagainst specific sexist attacks andpractices, on the job, in the com-munities, and in the schools.

*Bring a communist line onfighting sexism into groups andorganizations we are working in:for example, unions, anti-imper-ialist formations, anti-sexist or-ganizations, community groups.

By W. W.W.

COMMUNISM AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SEXISM

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