19. The tasks of providing food, shelter and comfort necessary for the reproduction of labour power must be undertaken collectively by society, ending the individual responsibility of each separate family to try and cope. Only when relieved of this domestic slavery can women be drawn into socialised production fully and equally alongside men. However, this socialisation will only have a really socialist character if it is accompanied by the destruction of the gender-specific division of labour (and the corresponding roles) in socialised production. Women will not be the only historical subject for this special transformation, the deliberate dissolution of the bourgeois family and the overcoming of gender-specific forces, although they will be the most forward pushing section of the working class on this matter.
Of course in this struggle women, as an undifferentiated mass, will not act in a uniform fashion to destroy male dominance and the bourgeois family.To believe this would be to collapse into the spontaneist idea that the fact of oppression will generate uniform resistance amongst the oppressed automatically. In this struggle, as in all others, the vanguard will play a decisive role.The revolutionary party itself, and crucially the women members of the Party, will be in the forefront of this struggle. Communist women will organise the most advanced layers, including non-Party class fighters amongst the working class, especially women, to combat sexism, to fight for equality and to mobilise the whole mass of working women to play their role as the historical subject of socialist transformation and women’s emancipation.
These tasks are inseparable from the overthrow of the private ownership of the means of production. Then, and only then, will it be possible on the basis of a planned economy, to systematically eradicate all aspects of women’s oppression, legal, economic, social and political. To initiate this process the seizure of state power by the working class, armed and organised into workers’ councils and workers’ militias, and the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters is necessary.
Women’s subordination and the centrality of the family in everyday life have been features of all previous class societies. The true liberation of women and children from their oppression, plus the transformation of life for everyone under socialism, will require a long and difficult struggle against the ideas and norms of the past. The transformation of the personality, of the psyche, which will be necessary for people to live collectively and co-operatively will take generations to achieve fully.
The deep psychological scars of being raised and working in a society based on profit, greed and struggle will not disappear overnight.A conscious struggle for change will be required for many years. But with the material basis for collectivity established through the creation of a workers’ state, planning for need and not profit, the destruction of the lonely prison of the privatised household, the “struggle” for the new psyche, for the new, truly human being and really liberated sexual relationships, will be possible.
In 1848 Marx and Engels raised the demand for the abolition of the bourgeois family. In Russia after October 1917, it became clear that the family relations built up by capitalism could not, however, be abolished in one stroke. The workers’ state created the economic basis upon which domestic labour could be socialised (though Stalinism has thwarted the realisation of this gain as it has so many others). By socialising many aspects of domestic labour the workers’ state does not abolish the bourgeois family, advances the means by which women could free themselves from the family prison and from privatised labour.
To the extent that this process of socialisation (through communal child rearing, cleaning and eating facilities) is successful the basis for the “old” family inherited from capitalism is eradicated. In this sense the “old” family, like the state itself will wither away with the advance towards communism. However, just as we will not be drawn into predicting, in a utopian fashion, the nature of sexual relations under communism, we will not be drawn on painting a picture of what the “family” will look like under communism.
The bourgeois family will disappear. What will replace it is something that people of the future will determine, free from the material and ideological constraints that characterise (and torment) familial relations under capitalism. By the same token the conditions for real sexual liberation, in which people are at liberty to determine their own sexuality, will be created.
20. The role of women in the overthrow of capitalism and the building of socialism is essential. As part of the working class women must be involved in the struggle for power. Women all over the world have demonstrated their capacity for struggle. Indeed it is often the case that women workers, faced with the severe problems of managing a family and working, are an explosive force within the class struggle (Russia in February 1917 for example).
Moreover, because women are often unorganised, or only recently organised, they can, for a period of time, combine explosive militancy with freedom from bureaucratic rules and regulations that characterise the “normal” trade union routine. Precisely because of the burdens and tasks that our bound up with housework and child-rearing, independent women’s organisations such as (housewives) women’s price control and food distribution committees, play a decisive role, as part of a proletarian women’s movement, in the establishment of organs of workers’ power in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods.
Failure to positively win working class women to the struggle can leave them prey to the arguments of the ruling class and allow them to act as a backward force within the working class. As the people most centrally involved in the rasing of children, the provision of daily needs and as the primary “home-makers“, women’s experience and contribution will be vital in the planning of social provision for these tasks.
Working class women are central to the struggle for the emancipation of both women and the working class-they are the most oppressed section of their sex. Amongst women they have the most radical interest in the overthrow of their oppression in capitalism. The achievement of equal rights and opportunities, or utopian schemes for individual sexual and psychological liberation, will not satisfy the fundamental needs of proletarian women. And within the working class they have no aristocratic privileges, and comparatively less skilled status and high wages, to reconcile them to capitalism.
However, all too often the best organised women workers are misled by reformist trade union leaders, who have themselves made their peace with capitalism. This, plus the traditional backwardness of many women due to their isolation in the home, prey to the ideas of the mass media and the church, indicates that intense oppression and exploitation are not sufficient on their own to throw women into the leadership of the struggle for liberation. This remains true even in the semi-colonies where the oppression of women workers and peasants is even more acute than in the imperialist countries.
The working class is the first exploited class capable of ending all exploitation. This is not simply because it is the most exploited and oppressed class, but because capitalism itself organised it at the centre of socialised production, enabling it to become conscious of itself as a class, to organise against and overthrow the capitalists and re-organise production.Women form part of the working class with precisely this potential. Though capitalism has never been able to draw all proletarian women into production, women do form a vital component of the workforce and it is this section, partially released from the stultifying effects of domestic isolation, who can act as the vanguard of all proletarian women.