Women, Family and the Russian Revolution

By John Roberts and Fred Weston

The Bolsheviks came to power in a workers’ and peasants’ revolution supported by the great majority of Russian women. Abortion was legalized immediately and made available to women without charge. For the first time wives were empowered to divorce their husbands, and many took the opportunity. In a society in which few homes had any basic amenities, it was envisaged that women would be freed from household drudgery by child-care centres, communal dining halls, and public laundries; and the predictions of Engels that mutual affection and respect would underpin relations between the sexes would be realised.

Under socialism the bourgeois family would wither away, releasing women from kitchen slavery and bringing them equality with men. But the betrayal by Social Democracy of the revolutionary upsurge following WW1, and the pressure of imperialism on an isolated, backward, semi-feudal country meant a reactionary bureaucracy usurped political power, imposed a totalitarian regime, and enacted legislation to strengthen the conservative elements within Soviet society, restricting women’s rights to divorce, abolishing the right to abortion, and strengthening the family. This book ends by noting the social and economic degradation imposed on Russian women by capitalist restoration, concluding that only a socialist, proletarian-led revolution can finally achieve women’s emancipation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wellred
• Release date: Mar 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215426685

John Roberts

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Introduction

The alienation and degradation of human beings, the indifference to human suffering, and the excessive self-indulgence seen in modern capitalism have reached levels unknown in history. The severity of the economic and social crisis in which capitalism finds itself, exacerbated and enhanced by the COVID-19 pandemic, has brought to the fore its most reactionary features as it attempts to maintain its rule. As always, the crisis of capitalism on a global scale falls with special severity on the shoulders of women who are amongst those directly affected through the inherent oppression they experience in a male-dominated world. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, women’s democratic rights are under attack, but women are increasingly refusing to tolerate being treated as second-class citizens, openly rejecting their subservient position in the family and society. This rebellion of women against a monstrous tyranny is of fundamental importance in the struggle for the socialist revolution and female emancipation, neither of which can be attained without the full participation of women.

Capitalist society enforces sexual and racial identities that penetrate deeply into every aspect of our lives, sustaining the degradation of women as sex objects and acceptance of male violence against women. The roots of the oppression of women and their assigned gender roles precede capitalism and arise from the material basis of a class society. Capitalism continues to combine exploitation, oppression and biological factors with the goal of maintaining the bourgeois family because it is such an important pillar of capitalism. The patriarchal family structure is fundamental to the oppression of women, assigning them the housework, child-rearing, care for the elderly and sick, and justified as fitting woman’s nature.

The very real pressures that come from millennia of class society, to conform to bourgeois norms as a heterosexual man or woman, are evidenced in widespread discrimination against gays and transgender people in housing and the workplace, and in violent attacks upon such people when they simply walk in public spaces. Simultaneously, attempts are made to defuse the challenge posed by gay relationships by recognising homosexual couples as family units, which in itself confirms the importance of the bourgeois family as a social institution.[1]

Gender, sexual and racial prejudices represent the flagships of reaction. The right of a woman to control her own body, the right of women to vote, and equality before the law are under attack. In the USA, the richest, most powerful country on earth, and the embodiment of capitalism, none of these democratic rights are assured.

A woman’s right to control her own body has long been a terrain of political struggle. The relatively liberal abortion laws that remain in place today are the result of mass campaigns of women determined to control their childbearing. In the successful campaign to liberalise abortion laws in Ireland in 2018, the campaign was actively supported by trade unions such as Unite, Unison, the Communication Workers Union Ireland, Mandate Trade Union, and the GMB, with urban working women taking the lead.[2] It was not until 1973 that abortion was legalised in the USA, after a Supreme Court decision that was ultimately the result of years of mass struggle. This was fifty years after the legalisation of abortion in the Soviet Union. Ever since there has been a fierce, well-funded, and often violent anti-abortion campaign spearheaded by religious fundamentalists. The US government is pressurised to de-fund any state-funded health programmes which include abortion provisions, even the ‘morning after’ pill. Individual states have imposed impossible-to-meet conditions on abortion clinics, there has been extensive aggressive picketing of clinics, arson attacks, bombings, assaults, and murder of doctors and staff.

But this is only one episode in the ongoing story of women’s bodies as a battleground for human rights and dignity. The scandal of thousands of poor African-American women forcibly sterilised in the United States in the 1950s was horrific, but on a smaller but no less horrifying scale, the practice has continued in places such as California as recently as 2010. Today in India over ten million Dalit women and women from indigenous tribes living at or below the poverty line have been sterilised since 2000. Masquerading as a ‘woman’s choice’, most such procedures are the result of a cash payment of up to US$20, in a country where over 200 million people live on less than US$2 a day. Women and their reproductive capabilities remain a focus of political struggle across the world. This includes the struggle for reproductive justice, in evidence when women with the legal right to abortion are denied that entitlement due to cost, distance to the nearest provider, or other obstacles.

The Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, which codify equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex was approved by Congress in 1972. Since then, it has been blocked by hard-line Republican state legislatures and has yet to achieve the three-fourths supermajority required to become law. The United States, unlike almost every other country in the world, has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, often called the Women’s Bill of Rights. The reasons given include its promotion of access to family planning which would threaten traditional family values and ‘natural’ gender roles.

The electoral system in the USA is inherently undemocratic and was intended to be so by the founding fathers who designed a procedure to favour conservative land and slave-owners above industrialists and the working class. With two senators per state, rural Wyoming has the same Senatorial power as urban California which has a population almost seventy times as great.

In the USA, Generation Z and the Millennials are remarkably sympathetic towards socialist policies, supporting free college education and a national health service and voting for self-styled ‘democratic-socialists’ such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the coming years these young people will have greater electoral weight, and lacking a class independent alternative, many will vote for the ‘kinder, gentler’ capitalist Democrats. Republican Party activists have devised, from their viewpoint, an entirely logical response, selectively taking the vote away from some of the poorest and most oppressed. In local elections and elections to Congress, blatant gerrymandering is now the norm for both parties. Currently Republican state legislatures are removing polling stations from those areas where the population is predominantly of colour while preparing to restrict postal voting and limiting who can vote by devious voter registration mechanisms. The most extreme of the Republican legislatures are giving themselves the power to overrule the results of an election and reject elected candidates.

The demand for equality before the law has taken a radical form in the Black Lives Matter campaign. In the USA, according to the 3 July 2020 New York Times, as many as 26 million people demonstrated nationwide over the murder of George Floyd. Parallel demonstrations took place across the world revealing the outrage at police violence and the system that engenders it. Widespread public support, as high as 75 per cent according to some opinion polls, forced the US ruling class to back off from more open forms of repression, and attempted to defuse the movement by bringing Derek Chauvain, the police officer who murdered Floyd, to trial and sentenced him to twenty-two years in jail. But such small concessions still leave the serious questions unanswered: What role do police play under capitalism? What will it take to abolish that institution?

A growing feeling of alienation and injustice is feeding a general movement of rebellion against the existing state of affairs. The awakening of millions of women, especially the younger generation who feel a burning indignation about the discrimination, oppression, and humiliation to which they are subjected under an unjust system, is a profoundly progressive and revolutionary phenomenon that should be celebrated and supported with the utmost enthusiasm. The struggle for the advancement of women, against reactionary male chauvinism embodied in capitalism, for progressive reforms and complete equality in the social, political, and economic fields, is a fundamental duty.

Cultural Decay

In its youth, the bourgeoisie believed in progress, because, despite its brutal and exploitative features, capitalism played a hugely progressive role in developing the productive forces, and in so doing laid the material basis for a higher stage of human society: socialism. When the bourgeoisie played a progressive role, it had a revolutionary ideology. It produced great and original thinkers, but the intellectual products of the bourgeoisie in the period of its decline display all the signs of advanced senile decay. In particular, the postmodernist confusion that passes for philosophy today is an expression of abject intellectual bankruptcy and shrinks into insignificance when compared to the great bourgeois thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel.

The main purpose of current bourgeois philosophy is to play the role of King Canute, to attempt to hold back the tide of class struggle. Bourgeois philosophy today is characterised by pessimism, doubt, and despair. Everything useful that could be said by bourgeois philosophers was said long ago. Today capitalism has no interest in revealing the truth about society. Postmodernism and its developments play an important role, spreading confusion and false ideas by denying historical progress, for the simple reason that the society that spawned them is itself incapable of real progress. These ideas are being pushed throughout the universities as an alternative to, and rejection of, Marxism. The old society may be dying on its feet, but it still exerts a powerful influence through, for example, the advancement of the careers of petty-bourgeois elements with seemingly novel ideas who, in essence, defend the capitalist system. Through the conveyor belt of the university lecture theatre, they seek to infect each new generation of youth with their pessimism. Seemingly sophisticated, the postmodernists who lead the charge against Marxism scoff condescendingly at the possibility of achieving a revolutionary transformation of society.

The ruling class has always sown division in the working class, following the age-old tactic of divide and rule and using any means to turn one section of workers against another. Race, religion and gender – every one of these has been used, and is still being used, to divide the working class and to divert its attention away from the class struggle between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited.

A recent variant of these reactionary ideas sweeping the radical petty-bourgeoisie is the concept of identity politics, including intersectionality, Queer Theory and certain strands of feminism. It is no accident that these have risen in popularity. They reflect the pessimism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, after which successful revolution by the working class seemed far-fetched or impossible. With the resulting ebb of the class struggle, exacerbated in the UK by the defeat of the 1985 miners’ strike, a mood of pessimism swept through the petty-bourgeoisie resulting in many gay and feminist groups that had been so active in supporting the miners retreating into identity politics. The ideals of collective struggle gave way to a search for individual solutions.

And rather than analysing the objective, material basis of oppression, these new theories have as their starting and end points the subjective experiences of the individual, with the outcome that a general feeling of hopelessness replaced the class struggle. Change of language, appearance, and behaviour of one individual can ameliorate the experiences of another but will never end social oppression in a society underpinned by exploitation of man by man. The emancipation and ending of oppression in society cannot be reduced to personal lifestyle choices or the actions of an individual - kindly plantation owners did not end chattel slavery.

Such an idealistic approach can, in fact, become profoundly reactionary because in practice it turns one section of the oppressed against another instead of uniting against the bourgeois. United struggle is alien to intersectionality, and we can see the negative effects in the feuds between certain feminists and trans-right activists. One group of radical feminists in the UK was designated a hate group because of their virulent opposition to trans women, even after surgical intervention and hormone treatment, using facilities designated Women Only.[3]

The ugly splits and bitter clashes between Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) and the LGB Alliance against the majority of those who are LGBT do not serve the fight against oppression; instead, they undermine united struggle against Capital and inevitably play into the hands of reaction. Such actions provide the highest service to the capitalist class because instead of uniting the oppressed against capitalist oppression, they end up dividing the movement into an infinite number of categories. Such ideas, however ‘radical’ the language employed, can only have the most reactionary consequences. Rather than trying to find the root of capitalist oppression in the economic domination of the bourgeoisie, intersectionalists search for this in the social behaviour of people and the language they use. In their view, women’s oppression today is not a result of capitalist wage slavery, but of the discriminatory structures and language used in society. This is why one so rarely finds any mention of class, let alone the working class, in their articles and speeches.

Meanwhile, the bankers, capitalists and media barons rub their hands in glee as the oppressed consume their energies in squabbles and conflicts that leave the roots of their oppression largely untouched. And instead of engaging in mass struggle, activists are encouraged to wage isolated battles over particular issues. This is highly convenient for the ruling class, happy that attention is being diverted away from the central problem of how to unite all workers to overthrow a system that is inherently racist, homophobic, and sexist. Taken to its logical conclusion no mass organisation is possible, or even desirable, as the perspective is one of unique solutions to unique problems.

Bourgeois and petty-bourgeois feminists remain deeply attached to the project of civilising men as individuals, they demand that the gender question take precedence over all else, and that working class women must identify themselves first and foremost with all other women regardless of class, political ideology, etc. They project themselves as providing solutions to the immediate problems faced by women in a sexist society, and in doing so have gained support from certain layers of working women. However, the true nature of such identity politics was clearly exposed in the 2016 US presidential election, when Hillary Clinton, that most consummate representative of Wall Street and the billionaire class, appealed to women to vote for her because I’m a woman!. The alternative face was seen more recently, when Kamala Harris was California’s Attorney General, and failed to take action against the OneWest Bank for widespread misconduct in obtaining billions in subsidies then foreclosing on tens of thousands of women. Criticism of her actions have been rejected on the grounds that she is a woman of colour. She is now the first female Vice-President of the United States.

Much of modern feminism popularised in the media as ‘breaking the glass ceiling’, is no more than a fight to allow women to participate equally in the oppression of the powerless and the poor. Just how the entry of women into the boardrooms of banks and big businesses has helped the cause of women workers is not explained. Likewise, how Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel or Theresa May have helped the cause of their ‘sisters’ on the factory floor is a question yet to be answered. History has shown that in the last analysis bourgeois feminists defend what they see as the fundamental interests of the bourgeoisie – as they did over equal pay, over the right to vote – against working women.

History confirms that discriminatory behaviour by men is best modified not by pressure on individuals but by structural change on a societal scale. This book argues that the initial move towards a truly humane and free culture can only be achieved through a common struggle for emancipation by the working class. The struggle for revolutionary change is the only realistic way of breaking through generations of prejudice and taking the first steps towards throwing present-day discrimination, racism, sexism, and degradation of women and minorities into the dustbin of history.

The slogan: ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’, should be well known and understood by almost everyone on the Left. But in fighting against sexism, racism and other forms of oppression, it is possible to unwittingly play the game of the ruling class by putting what divides us before everything else, ignoring the basis of oppression in class society, which is class society itself.  Undoubtedly, there are numerous forms of oppression in addition to class exploitation and it is perfectly possible for gains to be made, such as the right of women to vote and to control their own bodies. Marxists wholeheartedly campaign in support of such demands without losing sight of the truth that the oppression of people of colour, of women, of gays, of trans people and so on are all reflections of aspects of capitalism and cannot be ended without removing the base out of which they grow.

Human society is rooted in history, and human consciousness is not a process free and independent but flows from that history, from the material, economic and social base of society. By changing that base, a socialist revolution is the first step in building a new society based on the greatest solidarity. The early years of the Russian Revolution are living proof of this.

Russian Revolution

Just over 100 years ago, as soon as the Bolshevik Party gained power in Russia in October 1917 it carried out the most sweeping programme in history for the emancipation of women and homosexuals, far more advanced than anything seen in the capitalist world before or since. The decisions made by the Bolsheviks regarding the liberation of women need to be placed in their historical context. Leading Marxists had first addressed the ‘Woman Question’ some seventy years earlier, their answers resonated during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the principles contained within their analyses provide a defining perspective for those seeking gender equality and freedom today.

The accusation that Marxists neglect or ignore the problems of women is demonstrably false. Marxists inscribed universal suffrage on their banner before the suffragettes; as early as 1848, Marx and Engels raised the demand for the abolition of the bourgeois family and, with Eleanor Marx, fought for equal pay for women in the face of open opposition by bourgeois feminists. Engels laid the scientific basis for explaining women’s oppression in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, recognised by feminists, revolutionaries, and scholars as a major contribution to the understanding of women’s position in society. He cited the source of the monogamous family and the political, economic, and sexual subordination of women not in human nature, but in private property, and argued that in a different social order, women could achieve equality but on two conditions: that they gained productive employment outside the home, and that housework and caring were transformed into social services paid for by public funds. August Bebel was the first to demonstrate the existence of the working woman’s double burden of housework and employment and to present the only workable solution, the end of capitalist exploitation and a socialist society.[4]

The October Revolution in Russia launched the greatest leap forward in sexual liberation in history, leaving no trace in Soviet Russia of any inequality between men and women under the law, and placing sexual practices firmly in the domain of personal choice. Pressure from the Soviets, particularly the Petrograd Soviet, ensured women were given the vote after the February Revolution, and every effort was made in the Soviet Union to persuade women not only to use their votes but also to stand for election. Another of the first actions taken by the Soviet regime was to abolish laws against homosexuality. In 1920, the Soviet Union became the first country in the twentieth century to legalise abortion, an example of ground-breaking policy and enlightened thinking by the new, revolutionary Soviet government that was a beacon for women’s rights activists across the world.

The Bolsheviks demonstrated in practice that united action for the overthrow of capitalism gave women and homosexuals qualitatively more rights and protection than any number of divisive quarrels about particular forms of oppression.

The actions of the Bolsheviks flowed from a programme in which the full emancipation of women was to be achieved by a social revolution which would abolish the very basis of their exploitation and oppression. That did not mean ignoring the struggle for the advancement of women under capitalism. The Bolsheviks fought against all forms of oppression. Women Bolsheviks, in particular, were active against domestic violence and for the rights of women in the workplace. They integrated demands specific to women into the general demands of strikes or protests, emphasising what promoted the collective, militant, class struggle necessary to win the fight to end class exploitation. For example, equal pay for equal work and an end to foremen searching women as they left the factory. Fighting against manifestations of the discrimination and the oppression of women was seen as a prior condition for achieving the militant unity of all workers.

The Bolsheviks saw the unity of men and women as workers as a prior condition for a successful struggle in the workplace. They could achieve this because they explained society in class terms, not in terms of gender; that the most fundamental division in society was (and is) between workers and capitalists, exploited and exploiters. There are other kinds of oppression, but in the last analysis, not one of these can be solved without ending capitalism and the bourgeois family. The Soviet state could introduce change from above, building homes, laundries, canteens, and while lack of material resources slowed that process down, a much more serious barrier was in the dark and secluded inner life of the family.[5] Changes from the top would come to nothing without corresponding changes within the family unit.

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 labour from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, crèches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organisations, moving-picture theatres, 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.[6]

A revolution is just the beginning of changing society, a necessary pre-condition for the emancipation of women and the end of prejudices based on gender differences. However, the early Soviet Union had to make good the destruction wrought by the First World War, then fight a civil war, then suffer possibly the most disastrous famine on record, all the time subject to a brutal but efficient blockade by the Royal Navy. Resources were few and far between, there was a wide gap between the aspirations of the Bolsheviks and the material resources to hand.

[…] after a short period of distrust of the government and its crèches, kindergartens and like institutions, the working women, and after them the more advanced peasants, appreciated the immeasurable advantages of the collective care of children as well as the socialisation of the whole family economy. Unfortunately, society proved too poor and little cultured. The real resources of the state did not correspond to the plans and intentions of the Communist Party. […] The actual liberation of women is unrealisable on a basis of ‘generalised want’. Experience soon proved this austere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before.[7]

As a result, the Soviet state was full of contradictions, shortcomings, inconsistencies, and social ferment as the tsarist heritage intertwined with (and tried to choke) the shoots of the future. Trotsky described in his pamphlet The Struggle for Cultured Speech, how in the early Soviet Union, the struggle for the emancipation of women was neither linear, nor easy, because human consciousness develops in a contradictory manner:

A man is a sound communist devoted to the cause, but women are for him just ‘females’, not to be taken seriously in any way. […] To account for that we must remember that different parts of the human consciousness do not change and develop simultaneously and on parallel lines. […] Human psychology is very conservative by nature, and the change due to the demands and the push of life affects in the first place those parts of the mind which are directly concerned in the case.[8]

It followed, as Trotsky also said, that the role of women revolutionaries was to be the moral battering ram for the socialist society to break through the old prejudices. Lenin put it this way:

We say that the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers themselves, and in exactly the same way the emancipation of working women is a matter for the working women themselves. The working women must themselves see to it that such institutions are developed, and this activity will bring about a complete change in their position as compared with what it was under the old, capitalist society.[9]

Thus every proletarian Communist woman was called on to devote a major part of her strength to mobilise the collective public opinion of all women workers so that everything that could be done, given the paucity of resources, was done.[10] Within its material limitations – limitations largely imposed by the imperialist blockade and support for the Whites in the civil war – the Bolshevik regime did all it could to end the oppression of women.

In modern capitalist societies the means already exist to provide the great mass of people with everything they need, and to enact effective environmental and species protection. An important measure of the progressiveness of a state is how vigorously it introduces and enforces the bourgeois-democratic right of women to control their own bodies. The freedom to choose to have an abortion was an important measure of the emancipation of Russian women and its prohibition, with the rehabilitation of the bourgeois family, can be used to track the crushing of Soviet women by a petty-bourgeois conservative bureaucracy.

Stalinism and the Socialist Family

For the greater part of its existence, the Soviet Union was under the control of a Stalinist bureaucracy, often referred to as ‘really existing socialism’. In fact, Stalinism was the antithesis of Bolshevism. Stalinism had nothing in common with Marxism, and the Stalinist view on women and homosexuals was most definitely not socialist. Rather, the degeneration of the bureaucracy and its return to capitalism can be tracked through its attitudes to the family, homosexuals, and a woman’s right to choose.

The bureaucracy obtained its perks and privileges by controlling the distribution of products produced by a workers’ state, but according to bourgeois norms. This meant the attitude of the regime to women was fundamentally contradictory. On the one hand, to strengthen its conservative base, it attempted to make stay-at-home motherhood the natural role of every woman and introduced the socialist family. The socialist family was modelled on the bourgeois family and used as an instrument to increase conservative attitudes in society; it was the antithesis of Bolshevik policy after the revolution. The socialist family would grow in social importance and play an important role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the return of capitalism.

However, at the same time, the bureaucracy administered nationalised industries under a state plan. In this role it was forced to invest vast resources in women’s education, guarantee them a job, provide practical support through extended maternity leave, generous maternity benefits, free healthcare, and provision of childcare facilities on a mass scale. Such provision was only possible because, despite the brake the bureaucracy imposed on industrial progress, the economic progress made provided the material base that made these reforms possible. These gains are invariably ignored in bourgeois reports of the Soviet era. Contrary to the picture presented in the popular capitalist media, the reality of women’s lives under so-called ‘state socialism’ – by which we mean a degenerated workers’ state where the gains, both economic and political, made in the October Revolution were in contradiction to the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy, and throughout this book this is what is meant by the use of this term – fundamentally challenged bourgeois attitudes to women as marriage fodder, replacing them with an understanding that a more enhanced and balanced life between work, home and family makes for greater happiness.

During its existence, the capitalist mass media painted that aspect of Soviet policy which encouraged women into full-time work as little short of aberrant, as denying the natural functions of womanhood. This was the same media that, during two world wars, encouraged women to work twelve-hour shifts in the poisonous atmospheres of munitions factories and then, as demobbed men looked for work, turned turtle and pictured the policy of wide-scale employment of women as cruelly robbing children of their mothers’ attention and affection. Working women were made to feel guilty, unhappy, worried about doing their best for their children.

Of course, today, numerous and extensive surveys across Europe and the USA have found for mothers with young children, those who are employed are less likely to be diagnosed with depression than those who stay at home.[11] The latest US census confirmed that most women in work prefer being at work than at home and, given the choice, would prefer to be employed, even if they didn’t need the income.[12] Employment provides contact with the world at large, mental stimulation, opportunities for self-expression, new relationships, new skills, and feelings of worth and accomplishment – all of which contribute to a better sense of well-being, to better mental and physical health, irrespective of the job.

Greater economic independence of the wife reduces the likelihood of divorce but also enables the wife to more easily exit a bad marriage.[13] An obvious example of this are the many American housewives trapped in unhappy marriages because their healthcare and the healthcare of their children is accessed via their husbands’ employment provision. In 2019 the average health insurance annual premium for a family of four in the USA was about $20,500, which is more than a woman working full-time on minimum wage would make in a year.[14] To leave one’s husband entailed losing one’s healthcare.

Any analysis of the position of women in the USSR that ignores the specific role of the bureaucracy inevitably ends covering up its selfish and pernicious behaviour. Analysing the role of the bureaucracy is necessary because it shows how petty-bourgeois ideologies play into the hands of counter-revolutionary interests.

Marxism and Emancipation

The subjugation of women to men, expressed in patriarchal family relations, coincided with the beginnings of class society, and will only finally be eradicated after the abolition of class society itself. Such a society can be achieved solely through the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the unity of the working class. The oppression of women and other scourges such as the destruction of the environment are integral to capitalism; and the only real way of putting an end to them is through the socialist transformation of society.

However, women cannot be expected to put to one side their immediate, pressing demands and simply await the arrival of socialism. The victory of the socialist revolution is unthinkable without the wholehearted support of women. Marxists are in no way indifferent to the deep-seated sense of indignation felt by the mass of working women who, under capitalism, suffer both as workers and women. This book is a contribution to the effort to bridge the transition between the democratic aspirations of women and the actual attainment of equality.

All those who consider themselves socialists should be at the forefront of every struggle against discrimination and inequality, campaigning for even the smallest demand that advances the cause of equality and opposes any form of oppression. On every issue (wages, pensions, housing, health, working conditions, discrimination) the day-to-day struggle for advance under capitalism is the only way to mobilise and organise the working class in preparation for the overthrow of capitalism, and to help to ensure women play a vital role.

Bolshevik activity before the revolution by the great mass of workers and peasants against capitalism showed the falseness of the claim that Marxists subordinate the struggle for the liberation of women to a distant socialist future. Bolsheviks actively opposed any and all oppression based on race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation. They led successful strikes of the most oppressed workers, the laundresses, they fought for votes for women, enacted it in the Soviets and forced the Provisional Government to follow suit. In this way they succeeded in building support that made possible the overthrow of capitalism. The October Revolution immediately rescinded all laws that demeaned and oppressed women and homosexuals, and soon after removed laws restricting a woman’s right to control her own body.

Engels had argued that the destruction of private property could transform the family from a unit held together by economic interests into one united by understanding, love, and mutual respect. However, those relations would be determined by a new generation who would be free from the economic and social constraints that bind personal relations today.[15] This was taken as a truism and, before 1917, little or no effort was put into determining what mechanisms would have to be established after the socialist revolution to eradicate the old patriarchal social order. Today we have the experience of the Soviet Union on which to draw.

Socialists fight for the emancipation of women and will defend every progressive measure, no matter how partial, that improves their status. The best way to carry on that fight is with the methods of proletarian class struggle, particularly unity in action but it can only be waged to a successful conclusion as part of a revolutionary struggle for a root and branch change in society. However, emancipation cannot be achieved by pitting one oppressed section of society against another, and a necessary condition for success is that the working class is united and conscious of its revolutionary tasks.

Marxists fight against any form of sexism, discrimination and oppression and work to guarantee all humans the freedom to express their sexuality. In opposition to intersectionality and Queer Theory, which emphasise the fight of the individual against a continuing patriarchy of which different class societies are merely subsets, Marxists emphasise the historic context and material base of the patriarchal family, and show it can be overthrown by ending class society. Marxists see their task as focusing on the common interests of the working class to strengthen unity in action, because that is the only way to overthrow this exploitative system.

Marxists are against any form of discrimination, and in contrast to identity politics do not perceive the interests of different genders, sexual orientations, etc., as opposed to each other. They therefore struggle for the inclusion of all people, independently of their ethnic origins, gender identity, religion, etc., into the struggle against the ruling class, the capitalist system and all forms of oppression that come with it. Marxists reject any ideology that leads to a practice that blocks, slows or makes impossible this struggle, no matter how ‘modern’ or radical it may appear.

Return to Capitalism

Bourgeois feminists responded badly to the gains made by women in the Soviet Union because they were supposedly imposed from above, by men who didn’t really care about women’s lives, and in the context of a dictatorial regime. Somehow, this disqualified from consideration women-specific benefits under a planned economy such as extended maternity leave. Instead, the emphasis was placed entirely on negative aspects, in particular the private sphere, male chauvinism, domestic violence and the double burden of formal employment and domestic labour. Those who attempted to point to the gains made by women were blind dupes of Marxist patriarchy […] insufficiently concerned with true women’s issues.[16]

The continuous message was that if only the Soviet regime could be overthrown women’s lives would be better. The Soviet regime collapsed, Russia is now a capitalist country, and we can compare women’s lives before and after the collapse. The possibility of such a comparison is a rare occurrence. It is a laboratory experiment on a continental scale, we can monitor whether the promises made to women that capitalism would improve their lives were true, or whether the analyses of Bebel and others, made 150 years ago that capitalism inevitably degrades women still holds true in the twenty-first century. We can test the adage ‘capitalism is bad for your health’ against actual events.

The Soviet Union, despite being isolated, destitute, and engaged in a life-or-death civil war, immediately enacted legislation that qualitatively changed women’s lives for the better. On the other hand, the transition to capitalism was under totally different circumstances, relatively peaceful with the support of international capitalism. If a market economy was to improve women’s lot, the circumstances could hardly have been more appropriate. Any changes for the better should have happened immediately.

Indeed, the first decade after the transition to capitalism was the period in which the greatest changes took place, but in quite the opposite direction to those expected by the apologists of capitalism. During the first ten years of the reintroduction of capitalism, women’s unemployment rates surged, women’s pay rates dropped like a stone when compared to those of men, day-care facilities were cut wholesale, healthcare evaporated, a woman’s life expectancy fell by four and a half years. Prostitution, pornography, sex slavery and trafficking became the major growth industries.

After the fall of ‘state socialism’ the support organisations it had provided for women were largely replaced by the Orthodox Church (in Poland and Eastern Europe it was the Catholic Church) and numerous NGOs, many specifically to deal with ‘women’s issues’. Most NGOs were funded by grants from the USA and Western Europe, and many were staffed by well-meaning feminists. These NGOs were intended to facilitate the change from ‘state socialism’ to capitalism, and while they were concerned with important issues such as domestic violence, they, and their backers, tended to ignore the problems caused by the new market economy, such as the many women who had lost their jobs.[17] They were a significant factor in why no organised, united woman’s movement came into existence to resist the inroads of capitalism into the state provisions made to support women. Fraser argues that the history of the return to capitalism shows that feminism became the handmaiden of neoliberalism.[18]

With the end of ‘state socialism’ and the arrival of the neoliberal market, the feminist activists in the NGOs were expected to address issues not discussed under ‘state socialism’. In practice this meant shifting the focus of activity from the ‘politics of equality’ to the ‘politics of identity’, not talking about the protection of women’s social rights (for example maternity leave and childcare), closing one’s eyes to the sudden emergence of gross class inequalities, and undermining any calls for retention of state ownership and social redistribution.[19] Instead, identity politics was promoted. As economic inequality rose and millions of people were impoverished, its emphasis was on personal experiences and that meant it was ambivalent as regards to, for example, privatisation. It was a turn away from the great majority of working women who had welcomed the protection offered under ‘state socialism’, towards middle-class professionals, comfortable with the new neoliberal environment, anxious to break the glass ceiling, and who tended to view working women who relied on, for example, state-provided childcare as needy, politically backward, and insensitive to the feminist cause.

The table on the following page presents the major achievements of the Bolshevik regime regarding women’s rights, see Chapters 1 to 8. We remind our readers that the comparison is between the achievements of a regime which had only recently come to power in a culturally backward, semi-feudal country, subject to a blockade by hostile imperialist powers and short of every resource, and the two most wealthy and supposedly progressive capitalist powers. Items that affected only a small minority of women (such as that a woman’s nationality was independent of that of her spouse enacted by the Bolsheviks in 1922, in the UK in 1948 and in the USA in 1940) are not included.

The table does not include later measures taken by the Stalinist bureaucracy to protect its privileged position. Homosexual acts were re-criminalised in 1934, abortion re-criminalised in 1936, the so-called ‘Soviet family’ introduced and thereafter continuously strengthened.[20] This was the Stalinist version of the bourgeois family, placing women’s emancipation in a blind alley, and was an important step in creating the conditions for the restoration of capitalism, see Chapters 9 to 14. The situation of women and LGBT people in the Russian Federation without the safety nets of job security, paid maternity leave and state provision of childcare, in the face of a sexist and homophobic regime is presented in Chapter 15.

Notes

[1] See Y. Kipcak, ‘Marxism vs Queer Theory’, In Defence of Marxism, 2019.

[2] See J. Devlin-Trew, F. Bloomer, N. McNamara, D. Mackle and C. Pierson, ‘Abortion as a Workplace Issue: A Trade Union Survey of North and South Ireland’.

[3] S. Rustin, ‘Feminists like me aren’t anti-trans – we just can’t discard the idea of sex’, The Guardian, 2020. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/30/feminists-anti-trans-idea-sex-gender-oppression (accessed 4 January 2023).

[4] See A. Bebel, Women and Socialism.

[5] L. Trotsky, Women and the Family, Pathfinder Press, 1973, p. 30.

[6] L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, Wellred Books, 2015, p. 103.

[7] Ibid, p. 104.

[8] L. Trotsky, The Struggle for Cultured Speech, Pravda, 15 May 1923.

Available online at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/women/life/23_05_16.htm (accessed 4 January 2022).

[9] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic’, 23 September 1919, Collected Works (henceforth referred to as LCW), Vol. 30, Lawrence & Wishart, 1960, p. 44.

[10] L. Trotsky, ‘A Letter to a Moscow Women Workers’ Celebration and Rally’, Women and the Family, Pathfinder, 1970, p. 35.

[11] See E. Mendes, L. Saad and K. McGeeney, ‘Stay-at-Home Moms Report More Depression Sadness, Anger’, Gallup, 2012.

[12] See A. Muñoz and A. Woods, ‘Marxism and the Emancipation of Women’, In Defence of Marxism, 2021.

[13] See L. Sayer and S. Bianchi, ‘Women’s Economic Independence and the Probability of Divorce: A Review and Re-examination’.

[14] The Kaiser Family Foundation, Employer Health Benefits – 2019 Annual Survey, p. 30.

[15] See F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 2020, Wellred Books.

[16] Quoted in K. Ghodsee, Second World, Second Sex, Duke University Press, 2019, p. 14.

[17] J. Wedel, ‘Corruption and Organised Crime in Post-Communist States’, Trends in Organised Crime, 7(1), 2007, pp. 3-61.

[18] N. Fraser, ‘How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden’, The Guardian, 14 October 2013. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal (accessed 4 January 2023).

[19] See E. Gapova, ‘Rethinking the Legacy of the Socialist Emancipation Project’.

[20] In the USSR, homosexuality was de-criminalised in 1918 and legalised in 1922.

[21] As we go to print the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, unceremoniously trashing what should be a basic democratic right.

1. The ‘Woman Question’: Recognition of Women’s

Dual Burden

1.1 Introduction

Among the most universal and painful forms of oppression is that of women in a male-dominated world. The pioneers of women’s liberation showed that the mass participation of women themselves is essential to overthrow this monstrous tyranny and bring about the necessary fundamental changes in social relations. Confronting the subservient position of women in society and the family and challenging male domination was a vital issue for the Russian Revolution of 1917. Understanding what happened in Russia, warts and all, is necessary for solving the ‘Woman Question’ and to achieve women’s full liberation.

In its initial stages, the Soviet regime was the most progressive on the planet in terms of its policy towards women. The early Soviet republic is well known for introducing the most radical and wide-ranging laws that placed women on an equal legal footing with men. Not so much is known, however, about the struggle by Bolshevik women for women’s emancipation, nor the attempts to realise women’s rights in the new Soviet republic. This shortfall means that we have only a partial understanding of the October Revolution – the apex of the struggle for women’s rights – and the Soviet society which followed. That needs to be rectified.

The period immediately after the revolution was a time of great scarcity, of hunger and starvation, but despite these constraints the Bolshevik leadership did all it could to advance women’s equality. However, without a socialist revolution in a modern industrialised country coming to its assistance, the infant Soviet Union was laid waste, first by the Great War and then by the civil war that followed. A reactionary bureaucracy grew, exerted its authority and shaped the country to its own image. It imposed an increasingly conservative policy towards women, including strengthening the family, severely curtailing the grounds for divorce, and removing the right to abortion. Simultaneously, it made homosexual acts illegal. By these actions alone, Stalinism showed itself to be a false and vicious caricature of revolutionary Marxism. Nonetheless, despite this, we will show the power of the revolution was such that important gains made after 1917 were retained by Soviet women while Russia remained a workers’ state, even under the excesses and deformations of Stalinism. Today the horrors of Stalinism are often presented as representing the true nature of socialism, so it is necessary to explain how this anti-Marxist ideology dominated the workers’ movement for more than a generation.

Marxism, however, stands for the complete emancipation of women. There cannot be the slightest doubt on this. Marxists are expected to challenge all and any oppression of women, and under no circumstances allow it to become a secondary issue. Women cannot be expected to put to one side their immediate, pressing demands and await the arrival of socialism. It would be fatal for a socialist revolution if women believed that Marxists were not prepared to struggle for their rights here and now.

1.2 Marx, Engels, and Bebel: Recognition of Women’s Double Burden

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) dominated the world socialist movement before World War I (1914-18); and the analyses of the ‘Woman Question’ as developed by the Bolsheviks before and after the October Revolution were rooted in the works of Friedrich Engels and August Bebel, and the activities of Clara Zetkin in Germany in the decades before 1914. This was at a time when capitalism’s essential attitude to women was symbolised by the Christian acceptance that all humanity had been banished from the Garden of Eden because Eve persuaded Adam to eat an apple and, by that one act, all women were condemned for ever to subservience to male domination.

The German bourgeoisie was among the most conservative and intolerant of the European bourgeoisie, having abandoned any claim to democratic liberalism in 1848 when it had entered into an alliance with the landed aristocracy against the proletariat. The growth of the socialist movement in Germany was the product of Germany’s rapid industrial development within a rigid class structure that reflected the culture of the Junker landed aristocracy, with the result that an independent proletarian movement developed faster there than anywhere else. Of course, it also benefited from the direct intervention of Engels both organisationally and politically, which can be seen in his Critique of the Gotha Program. The SPD became a founding member and the most powerful section of the Second, Social-Democratic International until 1914.

Engels wrote at length about the large number of employed women in the UK, and the effects of capitalism on them, their families and children.[1] While there are sharp condemnations of women’s oppression, with copious details of their hellish working conditions, the stage of development was not yet ready for specific strategies to attract women workers to the communist movement. In 1846, Marx and Engels published The German Ideology in which they first suggested that the family was a social institution that corresponded to the mode of production. They asserted the root of women’s oppression lay in their subordinate role within the nuclear family; that women’s liberation required the communalisation of domestic labour leading to the abolition of the family as we presently know it.

In the following year, in a draft of the Communist Manifesto, Engels argued that the communist society would:

… make the relation between the sexes a purely private relation which concerns only the persons involved, and in which society has no call to interfere. It is able to do this because it abolishes private property and educates children communally, thus destroying the twin foundation of hitherto existing marriage – the dependence through private property of the wife upon the husband and of the children upon the parents.[2]

Engels lived up to this in his personal life. When Marx attempted to intervene in the emotional life of his daughters, Engels gave him carefully to understand that such matters concern nobody except the participants themselves.[3]

The Communist Manifesto stands out as a bold programmatic statement on communist goals concerning women and argues against idealisation of the family: The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.[4] Capitalism, it declared, had revealed the cash nexus at the heart of family life. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course […] with the vanishing of capital.[5]

From the early 1850s Marx and Engels were fully engaged in building the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA, First International). At that stage, they were struggling for acceptance of the core concept of class-against-class, of the contradiction between capital and labour, of the working class as the emancipator of society, and of the necessity for socialising ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Indeed, many in the First International saw any sectional demands such as votes for women, however justified, as dividing the working class in the face of the capitalists.

In 1864 the General Council of the International took the decision to admit women in the face of opposition by the French section. Two years later, in 1866, the General German Workers’ Association (ADAV), founded by Ferdinand Lassalle in May 1863, published a discussion document which said, among other things: The rightful work of women and mothers is in the home and family… The woman and mother should stand for the cosiness and poetry of domestic life.[6] These reactionary proposals were rejected by Marx and Engels who continued in their determination to appoint women to senior positions in the International, as in 1868 when Marx wrote to his friend Kugelmann: Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment.[7] A statement fully confirmed by the women leaders in the First International who leapt to the defence of the Paris Commune. Elisabeth Dmitrieff, for example, who had helped found the Russian section of the International, went to Paris immediately and plunged into the work of organising women’s groups, fighting on the streets of Paris against the troops of the Versailles government, before escaping into exile.

In 1867 Volume 1 of Capital was published. In this Marx spent considerable space discussing the effects of the factory system on women, children and the family system:

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution […] of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons, and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes. […] Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery.[8]

In June 1867, Harriet Law, freethinker and editor of The Secular Chronicle, with Marx’s support was voted onto the General Council and from this point all addresses and declarations of the IWMA written by Marx no longer addressed only working men but also working women. The IWMA was not a revolutionary party, but at the General Council in September 1871, Marx himself moved the following resolution:

The Conference recommends the formation of female branches among the working class. It is, however, understood that this resolution does not at all interfere with the existence or formation of branches composed of both sexes.[9]

During the 1860s, Friedrich Engels began working closely with August Bebel, a founding member of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (SDAP). After Lassalle’s death, Bebel played a key role in the merger of the SDAP and ADAV at a Congress held in Gotha in May 1875 to form the SPD. The programme proposed to the Congress was silent on the question of women’s suffrage. Bebel moved an amendment proposing the right to vote for citizens of both sexes but it was rejected by sixty-two votes to fifty-five.

This spurred Bebel into beginning work on what was to be the most widely read and influential book on the ‘Woman Question’. In 1879, Bebel published Women and Socialism, in which he argued that there was an identity of interests of working women as women and as workers, that women could be genuinely independent of men and equal in rights only after they achieved full economic and social independence, and this required a social revolution. The book was written at a time when Germany’s reactionary Laws of Association denied women