Well ye know
What woman is, for none of woman born
Can choose but drain the bitter dregs of woe
Which ever to the oppressed from the oppressors flow.
SHELLEY
The
oppression of women has been a key question for Marxism. After all,
women constitute half the human race, and have faced discrimination and
degradation in many areas of life. The oppression of women in the third
world has reached abominable levels. It is accompanied by child
prostitution, bonded-labour and slavery. It is capitalism in the raw.
Recently, an Iranian Islamic court found a woman guilty of adultery.
For this heinous crime, she was sentenced to death by stoning. Here, in
its most cruel and brutal form, is reflected the worse features of
class society. In the ‘civilised’ west, working class women are treated
as second-class citizens, many of who are forced into the menial jobs
on poor wages. Despite equal pay legislation, employers still continue
to discriminate against women in terms of pay and conditions.
Unlike
the petty bourgeois feminists who see the oppression of women as the
inherent biological trait of men, Marxism understands that the root of
women’s oppression lies not in biology, but in social conditions. While
feminists blame men for all the ills of women, Marxism sees the
liberation of working class women as a part of the struggle for the
liberation of the working class as a whole. While feminists set women
against men, the socialist movement attempts to forge solidarity
between male and female workers in a common struggle against capitalist
exploitation. The emancipation of women can never be achieved under
capitalist society, which holds working people, both women and men, in
subjugation.
Marxism has a duty to win the best women workers
to its banner, as from this oppressed layer – "a slave of a slave", to
use Engels’ words – will come the best class fighters for the socialist
revolution. It is no accident that women began the Russian Revolution
of 1917 on international women’s day.
The oppression of women
did not always exist. In fact it is a relatively new phenomenon in
historical terms. It arose with the division of society into classes
and the emergence of class society some 6,000 or so years ago. Prior to
that, in the period described by the American anthropologist Lewis
Henry Morgan as ‘primitive communism’, neither classes, the state,
private property nor the family existed. There was no domination of man
over women, or man over man. As there was no surplus created, only
enough to survive, there was no exploitation, which only emerged with
the development of the slave empires of Mesopotania, Egypt, Greece and
Rome.
Engels wrote ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State’, based mainly on the findings of Lewis Morgan, but also
supplemented by his own research, which examined this question from a
scientific point of view. The founding-fathers of modern anthropology,
in particular Morgan and his English counterpart Edward Tylor, gathered
a colossal amount of material from primitive tribes, the accounts of
missionaries and travellers, and many other sources in an attempt to
reconstruct a picture of primitive society. Morgan himself lived for
many years among the Iroquois Indians, who still lived at the higher
stage of savagery.
They were completely stunned when they found
that primitive society had no resemblance whatsoever, in terms of
social structure, customs and institutions, to modern civilised
society. It was fundamentally different.
Classless society
The
common assumption held by the scientific establishment until then, was
that primitive life was simply a more basic and underdeveloped version
of modern-day life. For them, all our class-based institutions would
exists in a less developed form. This completely suited the apologists
of capitalist society, who regarded exploitation, classes and social
division as eternal. This misconception was completely turned on its
head. Private property, family and state simply did not exist. There
was no ruling class or working class. There was no domination or the
degradation of women by men, or men by men. This classless society was
built on completely different egalitarian foundations.
According
to Morgan, before class society – which embraced some 99% of human
development – there existed two distinct phases of human society:
Savagery, based upon a hunter/gatherer economy, which corresponds to
the Old Stone Age, and Barbarism, based upon agriculture and stock
rearing, the New Stone Age. Throughout this massive expanse of time,
the structure of society, which was totally different from our own, was
based upon a clan or tribal system. This in turn was based upon
kinship, in which women were highly respected and played a leading role
within the clan. Production and distribution was all carried out in
common. There were no privileges or elites. Women were held in esteem,
as they were the bringers of life and future of the clan. To quote
Engels: "The communistic household, in which most or all of the women
belong to one and the same gens (clan), while men come from various
gentes (clans), is the material foundation of that supremacy of women
which was general in primitive timesÉ"
Both Morgan and Engels
were indebted to the German Bachofen, whose book, Der Murrerrecht
(Mother Right), provided a history of the family based upon the myths
and legends of the past, which showed that women were held in high
regard within the clan system. In this primitive society, sexual
relations were based upon primitive mating, where conception was
thought to have occurred through divine intervention. Primitive mating
went through a variety of changes, reaching a phase of group marriage
based on kinship. Under these circumstances, a child’s biological
father was unknown, and so the line of descent was traced through the
mother. This was the only way it could possibly be traced. This gave
women their pivotal role within society, and determined the matriarchal
character of the clan.
Mother-care
The
importance of women to society stemmed from – among other things –
their role in child bearing and mother-care, which was essential for
the survival not only of the clan, but also of the whole species. It is
no accident that in all the early myths and legends of creation, it is
the woman that is the bringer of life. Again, all the early gods were
women. Only with the advent of class society and dominant patriarchal
relations, do we see the emergence of the great male gods of the
ancients.
Over time a different system of taboos were
introduced, with grave punishments for those who transgressed them, to
regulate relations between male and female. The rule of incest was
invented to give stability to the tribe. Within the clan everyone was a
"brother" and "sister", and a "mother" and "father" to everyone. The
children would be regarded as everyone’s children and brought up in
this communal matriarchal community. Sex was forbidden between men and
women of the same clan, which prevented competition amongst males for
females. Men had to seek sexual partners in another clan and be adopted
by them, while women would remain within their original clan. Above
all, within this communistic clan there were fraternal relations
between all members. Today they are based upon class rule and reflect
domination, subordination and exploitation.
In the words of
Morgan, "All the members of an Iroquois gens were personally free and
they were bound to defend each other’s freedom; they were equal in
privileges and in personal rights, the sachem and chiefs claiming no
superiority; and they were a brotherhood bound together by the ties of
kin. Liberty, equality and fraternity, though never formulated, were
cardinal principles of the gens."
The term "mother" was not a
family term as today, but a social one. There is no term for "father"
or "family" in the matriarchal clan system as these were
incomprehensible terms. Biological relationships were subordinate to
collective-clan relationships. In clan society, the mother’s brother is
also regarded as the "male mother."
The bulk of modern
anthropologists reject the concept of a communist matriarchy. According
to them, all the evidence existing in today’s hunter/gatherer tribes at
best points to matrilineal descent, but nothing more. They fail to see
that existing matrilineal lines are leftovers of a prehistoric past
where women played a key role in all spheres. Logically, patriarchal
forms could not have pre-dated matriarchal ones as the father was
unknown. Of course the early matriarchy was not the mirror opposite of
today’s patriarchal society. Primitive society was communistic and
egalitarian. There were no classes or domination that exists today.
The
"family" emerged within the clan system at the stage of Barbarism and
the development of settled communities. The "pairing" family was the
embryo of the modern family, which emerged first as a matri-family and
then patri-family. This development coincided with the "Neothithic
Revolution", to use the words of Gordon Childe. It coincided with the
increased productivity and wealth that arose. The invention of the iron
plough opened the way for surpluses of grain. New methods of breeding
livestock increased the herds. This, in its turn, produced social
forces that began to undermine the clan/tribal system. It saw the
development of private property, which at first remained within the
clan, but given the division of labour increasingly fell into the hands
of men. "To him, therefore", stated Engels, belonged the cattle, and to
him the commodities and the slaves received in exchange for cattle. All
the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now
yielded fell to the man; the women shared in its enjoyment, but had no
part in its ownership."
However, children, who belonged to
their mother’s clan, could not inherit from their father, being of a
different clan in which his property had to remain. So with the new
wealth came new contradictions. As Engels explained: "Thus, on the one
hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the man’s position in
the family more important than the woman’s, and on the other hand
created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to
overthrow, in favour of his children, the traditional order of
inheritance. This, however, was impossible so long as descent was
reckoned according to mother-right. Mother-right, therefore, had to be
overthrown, and overthrown it was." As Engels adds, this act
constituted "the world historical defeat of the female sex."
Maternal clans
With
private property came the destruction of the communistic maternal
clans. In their place came class society, the state and the patriarchal
family. The form of marriage changed from polygamy to monogamy,
ensuring that children born in wedlock were those of the husband.
Marriage became a way of consolidating family fortunes and power. It
was not men who gained, as the majority were still enslaved. Only an
elite ruling class gained. The rest of society – men and women – were
brought under the heel of class rule. Only with the elimination of
class society can the human race be free of this enslavement. The
emancipation of women has become a class question, which is inseparable
from the socialist transformation of society.
And what of the
family? Under socialism, private housekeeping will be transformed into
a social industry. The care and education of children will become a
public matter. The domination of money relations will come to an end,
and men and women will find genuine relationships. To use Engels words:
"Once such people appear, they will not care a rap about what we today
think they should do. They will establish their own practice and their
own public opinion, conformable therewith, on the practice of each
individual – and that’s the end of it." Socialist society will free us
from the inhuman social relations under capitalism and the market
economy, and open up new vistas of human development. It will bring
about the liberation of men and women.
