Inessa Armand, a Bolshevik who established a department of the post-1917 Russian Communist Party devoted to women’s issues, made the following observation: “If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.” Neither is possible without the other.
For Marxists, women’s liberation has never been viewed as only the concern of women, but the responsibility of all revolutionaries, central to liberatory struggle. Marx and Engels provided a skeleton of theory around gender oppression and social reproduction that Marxists must continue to add flesh to. They stood for women’s liberation from the start and understood it to be core to the fight for socialism.
In the Marxist analysis, of primary importance is how humans interact with nature and each other to make things we need and want. That’s economics: how we plan, cooperate, and organize ourselves to produce stuff. We consider that most fundamental to human society: how we get by, how we make things, and the social relations involved in making things.
We call those the relations of production — how humans organize to produce and to reproduce their means of life, and most importantly who controls that process and who produces a surplus. The dominant ideas and institutions of society, like government, law, religion, science, morality, and culture, arise from and enshrine the relations of production. In class society, the way things are becomes the way things should be, must be, and have always been. There is “one struggle, one fight” because all of our social problems share a common root in the mode of production: capitalism.
Profit-making and life-making
Under capitalism, human labor power is focused on making commodities to be sold for a profit. Labor power itself is commodified in the process. And it is the only commodity that is produced outside of the circuit of commodity production.
Marxist social-reproduction theorist Tithi Bhattacharya asks, “If labor power produces value, how is labor power itself produced?” If labor produces all wealth, who produces the laborer? “What kinds of processes enable the worker to arrive at the doors of her place of work every day so that she can produce the wealth of society?”
Marx and Engels provided a skeleton of theory around gender oppression and social reproduction that Marxists must continue to add flesh to. They stood for women’s liberation from the start and understood it to be core to the fight for socialism.
Many of those processes happen inside the home — eating, sleeping, relaxing, emotional care, play, study, and so on. The home is a primary location for social reproduction. But many happen outside of it, including education, health care, transportation, recreation, and shopping.
This is the focus of social-reproduction theory: the paid and unpaid activities necessary to create, maintain, and restore the commodity of labor power.
We can delineate production and reproduction in various ways, but they cannot be fully severed from each other. Capitalism relies on both the labor used to produce commodities and the labor used to produce people. And it integrates both profit-making and life-making into a single unitary system.
The function of the family
Marxists locate the source of gender oppression in the role of the working-class family as a reproducer of labor power for capitalism, and in women’s unequal role inside it. Unpaid, feminized care-giving labor is vital to the functioning of capitalism, as a way of privatizing the labor and costs associated with raising, nurturing, and maintaining workers.
Capitalism relies on both the labor used to produce commodities and the labor used to produce people. And it integrates both profit-making and life-making into a single unitary system.
Capitalism offloads the work of social reproduction onto the working class by tasking primarily women with the reproduction, maintenance, and regeneration of the work force — often while also performing waged labor. Marxist social-reproduction theorist, Nancy Fraser explains:
From at least the industrial era, however, capitalist societies have separated the work of social reproduction from that of economic production. Associating the first with women and the second with men, they have remunerated “reproductive” activities in the coin of “love” and “virtue,” while compensating “productive work” in that of money.
The function of the working-class family is to provide the system with workers. (Two other ways the system gets workers: slavery and immigration.) This means not only making babies, raising, and educating them to be good workers, but replenishing existing workers on a daily basis by providing them with food, clothing, shelter, recreation, sleep, etc.
Rather than being collectivized, socialized, and with costs borne by the state or the capitalist class directly, these tasks have been individualized, privatized, and dumped onto workers themselves. “And because capitalism is a thing-making system, not a life-making system,” according to Bhattacharya, “these activities and these workers are severely undervalued. Social reproductive workers are the worst paid, they are the first to go, they face constant sexual harassment and often direct violence.”
The origin of gender oppression
Gender oppression did not exist in pre-class societies and only developed as societies became divided into classes. Contemporary archaeology and anthropology have validated these key arguments made by Engels almost 140 years ago in The Origin of The Family, Private Property, and The State.
Early human societies were classless and egalitarian. Marx and Engels called these hunter-gatherer and horticultural economies “primitive communism.” Women were able to combine parenting and productive labor in the home, as there was no strict demarcation between productive and reproductive activities. Labor was often divided by gender, but because women were central to production, systemic gender oppression was nonexistent. Class society changed that.
Capitalism offloads social reproduction onto the working class by tasking women with the reproduction, maintenance, and regeneration of the workforce — often while also performing waged labor.
Everywhere settled agriculture emerged, so did classes and class conflict. Thousands of years ago, from the Fertile Crescent to Mesoamerica and many places in between, the plow and advances in irrigation enabled societies to grow more food than they needed. The first surpluses! Tiny idle classes came to dominate the surpluses produced by massive laboring classes. (This is also when the first cops appear — the first defenders of wealth that wasn’t theirs.)
With class society, the family as we know it began to take form. Its specific form has varied in accordance with the mode of production. Just as gender roles are socially, not naturally constructed, the family is a social institution, not a biological necessity or an eternal form.
Settled agricultural societies needed women to bear more children to help out in the fields. And organizing into family groups enabled ownership and inheritance to be established. Class society also brought a shift toward patrilineage and men as heads of households, which Engels called “the world-historic defeat of the female sex.” Marxism, unlike patriarchy theory, recognizes that class society also brought the subordination of most men to a tiny minority.
As production for exchange overtook production for use, work and home became separate spaces. Women were predominantly relegated to social reproduction and left out of the “productive,” profit-making economy. Under these conditions, sexual division of labor eroded sexual equality.
The nuclear family is the engine of social reproduction. To maintain the family’s supply and replenishment of cheap, readily-available labor power, gender, sex, and sexuality must be policed. Misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic ideas reflect and reinforce capitalist social arrangements. As Marx wrote, “It is not the consciousness of men [people] that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”
As production for exchange overtook production for use, work and home became separate spaces. Women were predominantly relegated to social reproduction and left out of the “productive,” profit-making economy. Under these conditions, sexual division of labor eroded sexual equality.
Monogamy, intended for women only, ensures that property passes only to “legitimate” heirs. Subsequently, moral rules formed to preserve monogamy. Within bourgeois families, paternity conflicts arise primarily because of concerns over property and inheritance. In proletarian families, they arise primarily over who will bear the costs of raising a particular child. This is a major source of sex policing that emerges from the privatized nature of care work in our current society.
What might happen to the family under communism? According to Engels, communist society
will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage — the dependence rooted in private property, of the woman on the man, and of the children on the parents.
Another world is possible
After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks enacted legislation that gave women the right to vote and to hold public office, the right to divorce on demand, free abortion on demand, and paid maternity leave for four months before and after childbirth. They abolished the concept of illegitimacy. They repealed all laws criminalizing homosexuality along with other laws regulating sexuality. Most of these gains were later reversed under Stalin.
But, as Lenin wrote in 1919, “Laws alone are not enough, and we are by no means content with mere decrees.” The Bolsheviks recognized that a precondition for women’s liberation was an end to their unpaid labor inside the family. So, the revolutionary government launched a direct attack on the family by socializing social-reproductive work. Trotsky summed up their efforts in this way:
The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’ — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in, petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters.
The Bolsheviks understood that a victorious socialist revolution was the beginning, not the end of the struggle to win women’s liberation. Old customs and attitudes, “the muck of ages,” don’t change overnight. New generations must grow up without the ideological baggage perpetuated by class society. But more importantly, backward ideas cannot change unless the backward social practices that produce and continuously reproduce them change.
The primacy of class vs. class-reductionism
Marxism gets accused of being class-reductionist, of focusing on class at the expense of race and gender, of favoring struggles against exploitation over struggles against oppression. First of all, the socialist tradition is littered with chauvinists and mechanical thinkers who underrate, oversimplify, and relegate oppression to a side issue, independent from class struggle.
In one example from within our political tradition, the long time leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the UK, Chris Harman argued that “the benefits working class men get from the oppression of women are marginal indeed.” Though it is in the long-term, objective class interests of working-class men to support women’s liberation, fellow SWP UK leader, John Molyneux correctly pointed out that working-class men do get short-term, individual benefits from the sexist division of household labor. Denying this is part of the wooden approach that rejects the possibility of individual or sectional interests that contradict class interests.
The nuclear family is the engine of social reproduction. To maintain the family’s supply and replenishment of cheap, readily-available labor power, gender, sex, and sexuality must be policed. Misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic ideas reflect and reinforce capitalist social arrangements.
Some say socialists should raise only gender- and race-blind, class-wide demands that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Some look to wealth-redistribution as the solution. We have to fight these types at every turn. It is our responsibility as socialists to take up the demands of the oppressed and to demonstrate their oneness with the demands of the exploited.
Since gender and sexual liberation have not been achieved in Stalinist and social-democratic states, those who defend them as socialist have led some to question whether socialism can actually liberate women, gender non-conforming, and LGBTQ+ people. Some have concluded that there are two fundamental and independent structures in society: capitalism and patriarchy. This has caused great confusion. (Women’s oppression does predate capitalism, but was handed down by previous forms of class society.)
Australian Marxist Sandra Bloodworth asks:
If working-class men are part of the patriarchy, how then can the working class unite to overthrow capitalism? It also leads to the idea that working-class women must have to fight alongside the women who exploit them.
By contrast, Marxism holds that women’s oppression cannot be separated out from a general class analysis of society. As Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai wrote in 1909,
The followers of historical materialism reject the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of our day. … Women can become truly free and equal only in a world organized along new social and productive lines.
Paul D’Amato, US Marxist and author of The Meaning of Marxism, elaborated the point:
Marxism seeks not to separate exploitation and oppression, but to show how they are connected, and how the solution to one cannot be separated from the solution to the other. … Socialism is not only a theory of the liberation of the working class. It is a theory of the liberation of the working class as the foundation for the liberation of all of humanity—and not only from class exploitation, but all forms of oppression.
The class-reductionist caricature of Marxism, which comes from critics and self-identified Marxists alike, is based on a misunderstanding of the primacy that Marxism places on class. When Marxists say something is a class issue, we don’t mean it’s an issue of how much money a person earns or has, but that it results from social arrangements based on exploitation and class domination. This can’t be resolved via more equitable distribution; it must be resolved through a struggle for power. A class analysis of oppression doesn’t dismiss or diminish it, but emphasizes its severity by revealing that it goes all the way to the root.
The Bolsheviks recognized that a precondition for women’s liberation was an end to their unpaid labor inside the family. So, the revolutionary government launched a direct attack on the family by socializing social-reproductive work.
In an essay called “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others,” Marxist historian Gregory Myerson writes:
The primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not.
Yet many Marxists have historically focused more on the mode and relations of production than on the mode and relations of reproduction. Social-reproduction theory aims to resolve that. According to Bhattacharya, social-reproduction theory:
represents an effort to develop Marx’s labor theory of value in a specific direction. SRT is primarily concerned with understanding how categories of oppression (such as gender, race, and ableism) are co-produced in simultaneity with the production of surplus value.” “Oppression is theorized as structurally relational to, and hence shaped by, capitalist production rather than on the margins of analysis or add-ons to a deeper and more vital economic process.
Conclusions
What conclusions should Marxists draw from this understanding of social-reproduction theory and gender oppression? In an often-cited quote from his vital 1902 pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?, Lenin wrote that the socialist’s ideal should be:
the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalize all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation… in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.
Socialists must be the most intransigent fighters against oppression, and must demonstrate that the fight against oppression is integral to the fight for socialism. We must consistently argue that all members of the working class, regardless of their background, have a material interest in fighting oppression — and a historic responsibility to do so. This puts us at odds with class-reductionist, economist, and workerist trends that narrowly focus on exploitation and workplace struggle. It also distinguishes us from separatists and post-modernists, who argue each section of the class should “stay in their lane” and confront their particular forms of oppression in isolation.
Socialists must be the most intransigent fighters against oppression and the first to show that the fight against it is integral to the fight for socialism. This puts us at odds with the economist and workerist trends that narrowly focus on economic struggles and workplace organizing.
Marxists must oppose all forms of oppression, regardless of which class they affect. This means recognizing the progressive kernel of bourgeois feminism, while remaining politically independent from it. For example, while we support the right of women to be CEOs, we do not believe more women CEOs will reduce gender oppression in the workplace.
If women’s oppression is the result of class society, then it follows that fighting against it is a form of class struggle. As Bhattacharya puts it:
Spaces of production of value (point of production) and spaces for reproduction of labor power — may be separate in a strictly spatial sense, but they are actually united in the theoretical and operational senses. … Reproduction, in short, is therefore a site of class conflict. … If we take our lead from Marx himself, then it is utterly unclear why only the economic struggle for wages and benefits at the workplace must be designated as class struggle. Every social and political movement tending in the direction of gains for the working class as a whole, or challenging the power of capital as a whole, must be considered an aspect of class struggle.
The working class can fight in the sphere of reproduction, but can only win in the sphere of production. The Russian Revolution, for instance, began as a bread riot led by women, but was won by the Petrograd workers’ councils, where women constituted almost half of the workforce. Struggles outside the workplace often provide the spark, but to bring the system to its knees, workers must collectively withhold our labor. So we need to weave together political and economic struggles by raising political issues within our labor organizing and economic issues within our social movements.
Most of all, we need to build combative, internationalist, multi-gendered, multi-racial, working-class revolutionary organization that can fight from and for a Marxist perspective and won’t settle for anything less than overturning the mode of production.
Image: Still from The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Warner Bros., 1980.
