New Perspectives for the Liberation of Women - A Polemical Treatise

By Stefan Engel and Monika Gärtner-Engel

Women have developed a new self-confidence owing particularly to their involvement in social production and in the different social movements. This has again enhanced public awareness off the struggle for their liberation. The two authors, Monika Gärtner-Engel and Stefan Engel, intend their polemical treatise as a contribution to this societal discussion. At the same time they take an uncompromising stand for the liberation of women in a society freed from exploitation and oppression.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verlag Neuer Weg
• Release date: Mar 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9783880214224

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I. The Social Foundations of the Special Exploitation and Oppression of Women in Capitalism

1. Production and Reproduction of Immediate Life as Fundamental Law of the Historical Development of Mankind

The development of humanity differs essentially from the evolution of the animal kingdom owing to humanity’s more or less consciously organized social life. Human society must, on the one hand, procure the necessary means of subsistence, and, on the other hand, ensure the survival of the human species. In his work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Frederick Engels formulated the fundamental law of coming into being and passing away which underlies the history of the development of mankind from beginning to end:

According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is of a twofold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 191)

Humans, by producing their means of life, ensure the existence and propagation of the human species. The consumption of these means of subsistence coincides with the production and reproduction of the human species, i.e., with the preservation of human existence and its further development. This always encompasses the production and reproduction of human labor-power as well, and the improvement of its productivity. The consumption of labor, the application of human labor-power, is tantamount to the production of the necessary means of subsistence.

The unified process of production and reproduction of immediate life is carried on and consummated in the production of the means of subsistence and of human beings. These two kinds of production and reproduction condition the particular stage of social development and give the social institutions their particular, decisive character. Frederick Engels wrote:

The social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and of a definite country live are conditioned by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour, on the one hand, and of the family, on the other. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 191)

Human development does change its social forms in the course of history, but remains conditioned by the two kinds of production, the particular stage of labor and of the family.

The Production and Reproduction of Immediate Life in Primitive Society

The stage of development of labor in the epoch of the hunters and gatherers of primitive society was dialectically related to communal life in a communistic household and the collective ownership of land, shelter and the jointly produced instruments of labor.

Humans lived together in lineage groups (gens), which took pride in a common descent and were linked together by social and religious customs into a special community. The form of the family initially was group marriage, which, over a long period of time, developed into the pairing marriage. Over many thousands of years, the humans of primitive society learned by experience that the more inbreeding was ruled out, the better the human species developed. In the pairing marriage, that family form finally evolved which ruled out inbreeding of any sort. At this stage of development, the family was not a separate and distinct economic unit. It could not, and did not seek to, exist outside of a larger community.

Bourgeois ethnologists and the Catholic Church claim that the individual family has always been the determinative form of human social existence. Their intention is to bestow eternity upon the bourgeois family. Engels proved:

Under the gentile constitution, the family was never a unit of organisation, nor could it be, for man and wife necessarily belonged to two different gentes…; in the case of the family, it half belonged to the gens of the husband and half to that of the wife. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 269)

This social order knew only free and equal human beings—women as well as men. It was a society without a state and without laws, without special bodies and authorities separate from the people, without exploitation and oppression of man by man.

The social division of labor was a pure and simple outgrowth of nature based on distinctions of sex and age. The children were assigned only to the woman, since the significance of paternity was biologically unknown and socially irrelevant. Proceeding from their responsibility for the children and for nourishment, the women cared for the housework communally, preparing the food, producing clothing, gathering plants as food. The men procured food, hunted and fished, and went to war. In this classless order, this natural division of labor as a rule placed women undisputedly at the center of social, religious and cultural life, since they organized the communistic households.

The term for this in bourgeois usage, mother right or matriarchy, inadequately describes the social status of women then. It goes without saying that in a society without classes or state we cannot assume a right in the legal sense. Matriarchy, therefore, did not give women power over other parts of society, as was the case for men in the patriarchy of the slaveholder society or in feudalism. Owing to their social position, however, women enjoyed an authority in their lineage groups that was recognized by the men.

The communistic households differed substantially from the private housekeeping we know from the bourgeois individual family. They encompassed a considerably larger number of persons and organized all social life as a communal process in which all members of society, without exception, were involved. The production and reproduction of immediate life was social in every respect. The driving force was common survival.

The primitive societies were doomed to extinction—despite all the virtues described. The communistic households were fundamentally limited to a maximum size because humans were not yet capable of a higher, more complex organization extending beyond the immediacies of their practical life. This was the result of an underdeveloped production of the means of subsistence, which moved within the narrow bounds of what nature itself offered. Humans thus constantly were threatened with extinction due to the whims of nature. This stage of labor only permitted sparse settlement of large areas. Consequently, communistic primitive society lacked any prospect for development, for example through a growing population, through advances in labor productivity, or through denser settlement.

The development of labor productivity created for the first time a surplus of the means of life, exceeding the immediate requirements of society. This was the material basis for the emergence of private property and class distinctions, that is to say, the possibility for a minority of society to appropriate the fruits of the majority’s labor. With the formation of private property, the communistic households dissolved. The communal cultivated land and cattle were transferred to private ownership. With the division of labor between crop raising and cattle breeding and the separation from them of the handicrafts for the production of farming implements, of necessity commodity production developed.

The increased productivity of labor and the surpluses of foodstuffs production resulted mainly from cattle breeding and farming—the traditional fields of men’s activity. Moreover, in connection with animal husbandry, knowledge about the biological relationships of procreation and paternity grew. In order to identify the children with the fathers and be able to pass on the private property as an inheritance, from here on monogamy was demanded of women. Monogamous marriage began to become the economic unit of society. Private property or the lack of it in these individual families determined the social status of their members from then on in all class societies. The place of social equality between men and women was now taken by the patriarchal family system. The same natural division of labor between man and woman that established the prominent position of women in the house led with the emergence of private property to the predominance of the men in the family. Frederick Engels summed up this development:

The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also, the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children. This lowered position of women, especially manifest among the Greeks of the Heroic and still more of the Classical Age, has become gradually embellished and dissembled and, in part, clothed in a milder form, but by no means abolished. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 233)

With the division of society into classes, the origination of the state became a necessity, thus sealing the transition from classless society to class society with finality. In his writing, The State, Lenin summed up the decisive role of the state in class society:

But there was a time when there was no state, when general ties, the community itself, discipline and the ordering of work were maintained by force of custom and tradition, by the authority or the respect enjoyed by the elders of the clan or by women—who in those times not only frequently enjoyed a status equal to that of men, but not infrequently enjoyed an even higher status—and when there was no special category of persons who were specialists in ruling. History shows that the state as a special apparatus for coercing people arose wherever and whenever there appeared a division of society into classes, that is, a division into groups of people some of which were permanently in a position to appropriate the labour of others, where some people exploited others. (V. I. Lenin, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 204)

The Production and Reproduction of Immediate Life in Capitalist Society

Capitalism is that stage of development of class society in which labor has reached the stage of large-scale production with machinery in factories. The process of the production of the means of subsistence is socialized, whereas the preservation and propagation of the human species remain the private affair of the individual family.

The means of production are the property of the capitalist class. Their dominant position in society, which they achieve with the help of the state, is based thereupon. The working class must sell its labor-power to the capitalists in order to purchase life’s necessities. The class of capitalists lives off the exploitation of labor-power. Capitalist exploitation is tied to commodity production. Frederick Engels explained:

We call production of commodities that economic phase where articles are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for purposes of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use values. This phase extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time; it attains its full development under capitalist production only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, employs, for wages, labourers, people deprived of all means of production except their own labour-power, and pockets the excess of the selling price of the products over his outlay. (Engels, Special Introduction to the English Edition of ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 97)

Commodity production is the production of exchange values for sale. Commodities are those articles of use which are transferred to a buyer. This takes place in capitalism through the exchange of commodity for money.

In capitalism, the labor-power of human beings also becomes a commodity, with the worker selling his labor-power to the capitalists. As is the case with any commodity, its value is determined by the socially necessary time required for its production and reproduction, i.e., the value of the means of subsistence necessary to produce and reproduce this labor-power. But the continuity of capitalist production presupposes procreation, such that:

The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death must be continually replaced…. Hence the sum of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children…. (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 172)

Labor-power is not purely physical in nature. Today, in particular, in the age of microelectronics, a high level of general education and professional training is necessary. Lean production demands creative thinking, assumption of responsibility, language skills, communicative skills, and more, of the workers. The more means consumed for education and training, and the more time invested in these activities, the greater too the value of the human labor-power.

Human labor-power is a very special commodity. It is a valuecreating force, a source of value. It can produce more value than it calls its own. The workers thus only need a part of the workday to produce the equivalent of their wages. In the other part of the day they perform unpaid labor and create surplus value for the capitalist.

Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. (ibid., p. 509)

But the workers are not only a fundamental productive force in commodity production, but at the same time the decisive consumers. Production and consumption of commodities become identical in the social process of labor. Concerning the dialectical process of consumption and production in the labor process, Karl Marx said:

Labour uses up its material factors, its subject and its instruments, consumes them, and is therefore a process of consumption. Such productive consumption is distinguished from individual consumption by this, that the latter uses up products, as means of subsistence for the living individual; the former, as means whereby alone, labour, the labour-power of the living individual, is enabled to act. The product, therefore, of individual consumption, is the consumer himself, the result of productive consumption is a product distinct from the consumer. (ibid., p. 183)

The production and reproduction of immediate life in capitalist society appears as the identity of capitalist production and consumption of social labor. Production of commodities is, simultaneously, consumption of human labor, and individual consumption of commodities coincides with the production of human labor-power. The two are mutually interdependent: no consumption without production, and vice versa. Production and consumption are transformed into one another: consumption consummates production, and production creates new needs for consumption.

The consumption of human labor in capitalism is not just the basis for producing and reproducing the life of the worker, but also the basis of the life of the capitalist. Marx wrote:

The labourer’s productive consumption, and his individual consumption, are therefore totally distinct. In the former, he acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist. In the latter, he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital functions outside the process of production. The result of the one is, that the capitalist lives; of the other, that the labourer lives. (ibid., p. 571)

In capitalist society, production of means of subsistence for exchange is the determining aspect of the production and reproduction of immediate life, and capitalist wage labor and its appropriation by the capitalists is its fundamental basis.

Bourgeois and Petty-Bourgeois Criticism of the Twofold Conception of Production

Frederick Engels’ book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, was singled out by Lenin as one of the fundamental works of modern socialism, every sentence of which can be accepted with confidence, in the assurance that it has not been said at random but is based on immense historical and political material. (Lenin, The State, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 202; emphasis ours – the editors)

It is an outstanding guide to acquiring a deep understanding of the materialist conception of history and its application to the law-governed development of social life. Precisely the clarity of his statements and generalizations engendered vehement opposition from the theoreticians of revisionism. The Social-Democratic historian Heinrich Cunow asserted:

A development of the production of human beings corresponding to the development of the production of the means of subsistence does not exist. … It is not the customs observed in connection with the acts of procreation and birth that determine social life. It is the other way around: the customs concerned are the product of social life.

This is so clear, at least to anyone who has comprehended the Marxian materialist conception of history, that it appears almost incomprehensible how Engels could coordinate the "production of human beings" as an independent factor of economic development. (Die Marxsche Geschichts-, Gesellschafts- und Staatstheorie [The Marxian Theory of History, Society and the State], Vol. II, Buchhandlung Vorwärts, Berlin, 1921, pp. 140–141)

Cunow puts on a show of defending the materialist conception of history here in order to divert attention from the fact that he himself is attacking Marxism. His denial of the dialectical connection between production of the means of subsistence and production of human beings is completely contrary to reality. What are these means of subsistence needed for if not for the maintenance and propagation of human life? And, conversely, is it not so that the development of human life is most closely linked with ever new needs and the advances in the production of the means of subsistence?

Karl Kautsky, like Eduard Bernstein and other noted revisionists, concurred with the central point of Cunow’s criticism:

If we assume that the origination of and the changes in the social conditions relating to sexual intercourse are not determined by technological or economic changes but by some other, as yet unknown factor, we violate the consistency of the materialist conception of history. On that point I must agree with Cunow. (Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung [The Materialist Conception of History], Vol. 1, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1927, pp. 849–850)

As if there were no other material factors in the development of society than technology and economy! In primitive society, for instance, man’s increased awareness of the biological relationships involved in his reproduction had repercussions both on the development of the family and the development of labor productivity. Humans gradually went over to avoiding procreation among blood relatives and began to tame wild animals and breed domestic animals. They began to understand nature and to apply its laws purposefully to raise the level of the production and reproduction of immediate life. This was the expression of the more highly developed dialectical unity of man and nature.

While analyzing the social revolution from primitive society to the class society of modern civilization, Engels found this out:

The less the development of labour, and the more limited its volume of production and, therefore, the wealth of society, the more preponderatingly does the social order appear to be dominated by ties of sex. However, within this structure of society based on ties of sex, the productivity of labour develops more and more; with it, private property and exchange, differences in wealth, the possibility of utilising the labour power of others, and thereby the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which strive in the course of generations to adapt the old structures of society to the new conditions, until, finally, the incompatibility of the two leads to a complete revolution. (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, pp. 191–192; emphasis ours – the editors)

In a letter to Marx in 1882, Engels underscored his view that in primitive society it was not the way of producing that was the primary determinant of social development, but the degree of dissolution of the consanguineous ties:

To finally get the parallel between the Germans of Tacitus and the American redskins sorted out, I made a few excerpts from the first volume of your Bancroft. The similarity is indeed all that much more surprising as the mode of production is so basically different—here we have hunters and fishers, no cattle breeding or dirt farming; there we have migratory cattle breeding in the midst of transition to crop cultivation. This simply proves how, at this stage, the manner of production is less decisive than the degree of dissolution of the old blood ties and the old mutual community of the sexes in the tribe. (Marx and Engels, Werke, Vol. 35, p. 125; emphasis ours, our translation from the German)

The way in which people lived together in primitive society was thus the determining material condition of social development. It could be nothing else at this low stage of development of the production of the means of subsistence. The manner of living together in primitive society posed the fundamental demands requiring a higher level of human consciousness. This is confirmed by more recent scientific research, according to which the development of the brain among earlier humans did not come about solely from the immediate activity of procuring food:

The first question which arose as we pondered the roots of human consciousness was why the higher primates are more intelligent than the everyday management of their practical affairs warrants. The answer, as I see it, is to be found in the big intellectual demands raised by the social interaction of the primates. [Biology considers primates to be the half-apes, apes and, as highest stage, human beings – the editors.] (Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Der Ursprung des Menschen, Frankfurt am Main, 1998, p. 297, German edition of Origins Reconsidered; In Search of What Makes us Human, New York, 1992; our retranslation from the German)

Not until this human community had developed to a higher level did the production of the means of life begin to grow by leaps and bounds, and new and more comprehensive needs were created due to the larger number of humans living together.

Once labor had developed to a level which produced a social abundance of the means of life, the primitive communistic society could not continue to exist. Private property and the property relations associated therewith became the decisive foundation of social relations in the class society which now emerged. But at the same time, ties of kinship retained certain functions and played a more or less important role in people’s lives, for support claims, inheritance rights, and so forth. But in class society, relations of kinship are subordinated to relations of property and serve to maintain and strengthen the latter.

In two ways the revisionists Cunow, Kautsky and Bernstein attacked the political economy of Marxism established by Marx and Engels:

Firstly, they denied the twofold conception of production, according to which the production and reproduction of human life is a component part of the base of every society. There was a motive for this: if the dialectics of the twofold nature of production and reproduction formulated by Engels was a fiction, and, instead, only the conditions of the production of the means of subsistence were mirrored in the life circumstances of people, then there could be essentially nothing other than the society of exploiters in which everything is subjugated to the production of commodities. In that case there also could be no society built around the universal satisfaction of the material and intellectual wants of human beings. The only aim pursued by the revisionists is to achieve individual reforms for the working population in order to dispense with the revolutionary transformation of the capitalist conditions of life. The ultimate reason for the revisionist critique of Engels remains: reconciliation with capitalist society and thus betrayal of socialism.

Secondly, they propound a shallow mechanical relationship between economic base and political superstructure, one of simple causality, of cause and effect. Kautsky’s call for consistency of the materialist conception of history upon closer examination turns out to be pure economism. In 1890 Frederick Engels wrote in a letter to Joseph Bloch:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he