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Resistance Marxist Library On the Emancipation of Women V.I Lenin 2 On the Emancipation of Women Acknowledgement: “Methods and Forms of Work Among Communist Party Women” © Pluto Press, London; reprinted by permission. Resistance Books 2003 ISBN 1876646 03 9 Published by Resistance Books: resistancebooks.com Contents Introduction by Lisa Macdonald.............................................................5 Articles & Speeches by V.I. Lenin From The Development of Capitalism in Russia VI. Capitalist Manufacture & Capitalist Domestic Industry........................ 17 VII. The Development of Large-Scale Machine Industry............................ 18 From The Draft Program of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party ......21 From The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart...................................... 24 Civilised Europeans & Savage Asians.................................................................. 26 A Great Technical Achievement.......................................................................... 28 Capitalism & Female Labour............................................................................... 30 The Working Class & Neomalthusianism........................................................... 32 Fifth International Congress Against Prostitution.............................................. 35 Petty Production in Agriculture........................................................................... 37 To Inessa Armand (1)........................................................................................... 40 To Inessa Armand (2)........................................................................................... 42 From A Caricature of Marxism & Imperialist Economism................................ 45 From Tasks of the Left Zimmerwaldists in the Swiss Social-Democratic Party................................................................................................................ 48 From The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution........................................ 49 From Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Program.......................... 50 From Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?.................................................... 54 Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women........................... 59 From Draft Program of the RCP(B).................................................................... 61 From A Great Beginning...................................................................................... 62 The Tasks of the Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic........... 65 Soviet Power & the Status of Women................................................................. 70 To the Bureau of the Women’s Congress in Petrograd Gubernia.................... 73 To the Working Women...................................................................................... 74 On International Working Women’s Day.......................................................... 76 Greetings to the All-Russia Conference of Gubernia Soviet Women’s 4 On the Emancipation of Women Departments......................................................................................................... 78 International Working Women’s Day.................................................................79 Message of Greetings to the Conference of Representatives of Women’s Departments of the Peoples of Soviet Regions & Republics in the East...................................................................................... 81 From The Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution................................ 82 From On the Significance of Militant Materialism.............................................. 84 To the Nonparty Conference of Factory & Peasant Women of Moscow City & Moscow Gubernia............................................................... 86 Appendices 1. From The Program of the Communist Party of Russia ..............87 2. From The ABC of Communism by Nikolai Bukharin & Evgeny Preobrazhensky............................................................88 3. From My Recollections of Lenin by Clara Zetkin........................91 4.Methods & Forms of Work Among Communist Party Women: Theses .........................................................................112 Basic principles............................................................................................. 112 Methods & forms of work among women................................................. 117 Party work among women in the soviet countries..................................... 119 In bourgeois-capitalist countries................................................................. 121 In the economically backward countries (the East)..................................... 122 Methods of agitation & propaganda........................................................... 124 The structure of the departments............................................................... 126 On international work.................................................................................. 128 5.From the Old Family to the New by Leon Trotsky....................129 6.The Protection of Motherhood & the Struggle for Culture by Leon Trotsky.........................................................................136 7.The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky................................146 Notes .................................................................................................156 Glossary ............................................................................................163 Introduction By Lisa Macdonald The persistence of gender inequality in the most advanced capitalist societies, with the most complete bourgeois democracy in which women have full formal equality, has put paid to the idea that women’s liberation is possible within the framework of capitalism, even in its “healthiest” periods of expansion. Today, in a period of global capitalist stagnation and crisis, as the “gender gap” widens and women, especially in the Third World, bear the brunt of the capitalist class’s neoliberal offensive against the working class as a whole, the correctness of the Marxist analysis of women’s oppression as a cornerstone of class society and its revolutionary approach to achieving women’s liberation is clearer than ever before. Since Karl Marx and Frederick Engels first developed their materialist conception of history in the 1840s, Marxism has sought to understand and combat the specific oppression of women. Engels’ explanation of the roots of women’s oppression in the main institutions of class society — private property and the family — rather than in the realm of the natural or biological, was an enormous advance, laying the foundations for a scientific approach to women’s plight which posed, for the first time, liberation as possible. In his 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,1 Engels identified the source of the oppression of women as their exclusion from social production and the conversion of household tasks into a private service. Both resulted from the replacement of collective production and communal property ownership with private male ownership of the basic means of production during the emergence of class society. In preclass societies, there was no material basis for exploitative relations between the sexes. Males and females participated in social production, the labour of both sexes being necessary to ensure the survival of the human group as a whole. The social Lisa Macdonald is a member of the Socialist Alliance. 6 On the Emancipation of Women status of men and women reflected the indispensable roles that each played. The change in women’s status occurred alongside the growing productivity of human labour as a result of developments in productive technologies, and the private appropriation of the resulting economic surplus. With the possibility for some humans to prosper from the exploitation of the labour of others, women, because of their role in reproduction (both to maintain the existing generation and reproduce the next generation), became valuable property. Like slaves and cattle, they were a source of wealth: they alone could produce new human beings whose labour power could be exploited. Thus the purchase of women by men, along with all rights to their future offspring, arose as one of the economic and social institutions of the new order based on private property. Women’s primary social role was increasingly defined as domestic servant and child-bearer until, with the development of urban centres based on crafts and trade, their independent role in social production was excluded altogether. The oppression of women was thus institutionalised through the family system. Women’s role in production came to be determined by the family to which they belonged, by the man to whom they were subordinate. They were rendered economically dependent. In the words of Engels: The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules. Today, in the great majority of cases, the man has to be the earner, the breadwinner of the family, at least among the propertied classes, and this gives him a dominating position which requires no special legal privileges. In the family, he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat. The class divisions of society — between those who possessed property
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