Ending women’s oppression – What’s socialism got to do with it?

Lynda McEwan

The oppression of women, ideas of sexism and misogyny, whilst entrenched in modern society, hasn’t always been the way humans existed. Under primitive communism, early hunter gatherer societies, the division of labour was more equally shared and women weren’t seen as the lesser of the sexes.

Women would take part in hunting and men with child rearing duties, neither role being seen as less important than the other. Recent anthropological studies confirm these findings.

It’s important to highlight this fact because the capitalist class maintain that gender inequality is inherent and the natural order of things, alongside gender based violence and sexism.

Engels

Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, explains that it was the transition away from kinship living to working the land, agriculture and farming where eventually a surplus was created and an elite class who hoarded that surplus, that caused the development of inheritance along male lines and in turn women becoming relegated to domestic work in private homes within the family unit.

These economic class relations were based on the private ownership of the means of production which continues today as bosses accumulate vast amounts of individual wealth at the expense of the working class who create that wealth through waged labour.

Escalating war, famine, climate catastrophe and the cost of living crisis, all further the oppression of women.

All women are oppressed under capitalism but, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks explained, working class women are doubly oppressed, condemned to domestic slavery, child rearing and working in often low paid jobs alongside women’s services being eroded under austerity and attacks on women’s rights.

The idea that more women in power will automatically benefit working class women, which is promoted by the capitalist class, has begun to radicalise new layers of young women who want to fight against gender based violence, rape, unequal pay and the intrinsically sexist ideas of the sex and beauty industries, etc.

Liberal capitalist feminists, like Sturgeon in Scotland and Arden in New Zealand, have no answers to any of these questions. They have became unpopular through implementing attacks on the working class including women.

Cuts and attacks on the working class allow an opening for the far right to exploit who want to roll back on the hard won gains in women’s rights such as abortion rights.

united struggle

The steps forward women have made throughout history have been won as a result of united, working class struggle. The right to vote, the right to work, abortion rights and domestic violence services are all wonderful examples of what can be achieved.

The equal pay strike in Glasgow in 2018 won equal pay compensation against a liberal feminist SNP council by uniting in trade union and mass struggle with their male comrades who took strike action in solidarity. They won £800 million for low paid female care workers across the city. An amazing victory for their class.

During the Russian revolution of 1917 huge gains were won for women under the socialist government, including legal divorces, communal restaurants and free childcare. That this was done in a backward society with none of the technological advances we have today, is a testament to how powerful the working class is.

As Karl Marx explained, when workers can’t buy back the goods they produce through their labour, a process of alienation occurs detaching them from their own lives and relationships.

Today we need to utilise those critical lessons of history and, in order to end women’s oppression, fight for an international socialist revolution that would bring the working class majority to power to own the means of production collectively and plan society democratically for the benefit of all.

This would mean an end to class society and the rule of a tiny majority and their exploitation. All the social problems that occur under capitalism; sexism, misogyny, violence against women and girls etc. would begin to wither away. Social and personal relationships would be transformed.

In Russia, women’s lives were completely changed under socialism. However, the counter revolution led by Stalin meant that while women could play a role in the workforce they were often still expected to take up the role of homemaker too.

The collapse of Stalinism in the early 90s showed that women’s lives were badly affected by the restoration of capitalism, with lowered life expectancy and an increase in crime against them, particularly trafficking.

We must prepare now the fertile ground for such a revolution by building new mass parties of the working class with a socialist programme.

The CWI (Committee for a Worker’s international) plays a key role across the world with socialists to the fore in taking up women’s oppression.

In India we are campaigning against caste brutality, slavery and for justice for rape victims. In the US we mobilised against the attack on Roe v Wade, and in France we have taken part in struggles against attacks on pensions.

Socialist Party Scotland and our predecessor Militant have a proud record from the excellent Campaign Against Domestic Violence in the 90s to the Equal Pay strike more recently.