conditions for their economic and social emancipation. By removing all legal and economic props to the tamily and marriuge, it freed women and children from the power of the father and husband. It abolished the connection between property and paternity and the exclusive sanction of marital sexuality. To allow women to participate in production on an equal footing with men, the economic functions of the family were socialised. No doubt much of this remained on paper for a greater part of the populaLion; this gigantic and novel experiment had an almost utopian character in Russia at the time, but it provided invaluable experience for all other ruvolutions. Trotsky was to write, in hia "Problems of Life" that it had been relatively easy for the Bolsheriks to grant women legal equality; that it was proving lar more difficult to give them economic equality (in the sense of introducing them into production on the same footing as men); that the really difficult lask, and that which was still out of reach for the moment (this was in 1924), was however to make women socially equal—i.e. equal inside the family. The accomplishment of this last task would in fact mean an end to the family, at least in any form in which it had existed hitherto. It would involve Temoving from the shoulders of women all responsibility for housework and childrearing arid the socialisation of these functions would require vast investments, investments which were still far beyond the capacities of the isolated and wardevastated Soviet State. It would mean constructing public kitchens, restaurants and laundries for the entire population. It would involve the provision of creches and infant schools for all-ullimately it would involve a massive revolution in housing and architecture to uccommodate the new forms of social organisatios which would spring up in the place of the old family, once the latter's economic props had been removed. The Stalinist counter-revolution terminated this experiment and turned the clock back so that in the late thirties the Soviet Union was hardly distinguishable from the capitalist world in its treatment of ECONOMY AND IDEOLOGY Between the thirties and the sixties there has been a fluctuation in the female labour force in the advanced capitalist countries. At the time of the war women participated massively in production; after the war they were withdrawn from the labour market-showing once again the role of the female labour as a reserve of force. This withdrawal of women from the labour market is always accompanied by an ideological onslaught that has been vividly described by many women writers. Betty Friedan in her Feminine Mystique described the situation of women in post-war United States. De Beauvoir's Second Sex is a landmark in the history of revolutionary writings on women. Although not a Marxist, she succeeded better than previous writers on this subject in capturing the essence of bourgeois ideology in relationship to women. Much work still remains to be done: the classical Marxist tradition has not provided an adequate theory of the role of the family in the social formation or the role of women in society, The relationship between female militancy in the capitalist countries and the periodic reconstitution of the labour farce in the seurch for cheaper labour remains to he explored as well as the connection between this militancy and other forms of the class struggle. NEITHER MALE CHAUVINISM NOR FEMINISM The women's liberation movement of today lacks the concreteness of the demand for the vote, but its literature is genuinely radical in the sense that women realise more and more that they cannot be free under the present system, However, feminist recommendations for the future are doomed to impotence. Society cannot be changed radically without the proletarion revolution any other perspective leads either to a struggle to change the women's status within the present system or utopian daydreaming.
Talking in terms of the generic categories of "men" and "women" only produces confusion, For women, an insistence on female solidarity against male oppression has historically been necessary. But to characterise "men" as enemies is a disastrous political position, because men and women equally belong to different and antagonistic classes, and therefore have different class loyalties. Bourgeois men in the pust have talked about female emancipation. For a social-democrat Loday, the struggle against women's oppression may seem a struggle for "human righta"—but how to specify these rights in a society based on inequaLity? Feminism claims that women's lib is an inter-class movement because all women are oppressed irrespective of their class background. Male chauvinism on the other hand presents all men as superior sex. Both are twin ideologies of the ruling class, the consequence of its sexual politics (male chauvinism being more reactionary because directed by a privileged against an oppressed sex). LIBERATION OF WOMEN IS A REVOLUTIONARY TASK For a revolutionary the struggle for women's liberation is a vital question of the revolution to come, a revolution that is not just the overthrow of the bourgeois rule but a long and painful process of preparation for and consolidation of this decisive rupture. Political and cultural revolution must necessarily accompany changes in economic organisation. The revolution in the West will take off from a more advanced economic base than did, • Ill be moking coline far arwhiayet..
for example, the Russian revolution. But the bourgeois rule in the West is much more entrenched ideologically, less visible and thus in some ways more powerful, It poses for revolutionary women special and difficult tasks never tackled before. Should women organise on the basis of women's demands alone or do they have to attack all aspects of the bourgeois rule? This rule has proved itself to be immensely flexible; is there anything to prevent it from granting greater freedom to women? It certainly cannot grant all women equality with men, even if this equality is defined in bourgeois terms but it does not follow that one has to wait for the revolution to occur, because the revolution cannot happen at all without the purticipation of women. Women cannot agree to the argument often presented within the trade union movement that it is not the right moment" to push their demands of that their political activity divides the working class nothing divides the working class more than the persistence of inequality and bourgeois ideology among its members. The revolution atarts now and immense work remains to be done. Starting now our demands must incorporate demands for real liberation of women. The four demands around which women are uniting today are only a beginning.
Branka Mages The Red Mole 8-22 March 1971 Page 11