MARXISM ANALYSES not just economic division into classes but the entire structure of society. The three most powerful structures of society are private property - in today's society the ownership of capital the state and the family. historical policy for women's liberation, and the liberation of the whole of humanity, must progressively, through an entire historical epoch, replace all three. In the first of two articles, based on an educational conference held by Socialist Action, JUDE WOODWARD looks at the origins of women's oppression. In the next issue she looks at the family in capitalist society.
THE reduction of Marxism to a view of society that only recognises the existence of economic classes is unfortunately only too common on the British left. Marxism does not examine only economy or economic classes, nor does it claim that the only divisions that exist are those between classes. It analyses the whole of 'civil society' and politics.
Lenin, writing on the national question, for example, pointed out that Marxists must recognise that 'the division of nations into oppressed and oppressor nations as basic, significant and inevitable under imperialism.' One of the most significant works of Engels was his attempt to understand the relationships between the development of economic classes, the oppression of women as a sex in the family, and the other relationships of political oppression organised by the state. In that book, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels explained that the oppression of women as a sex emerged at the beginnings of human civilisation, alongside the first emergence of class society itself. 'The first class antagonism that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male.' The oppression of women was one of the first oppressions to appear in human society, and, alongside the ending of classes themselves, will be among the last to finally disappear.
The oppression of the female sex Any SBUR But the MONAL FEDERA WRITE TO children. This degraded position women... has gradually been prettified and glossed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; but in no sense has it of as his natural heirs.
economic conditions.
social Domestic of the cient communistic household, comprised many single differentially cluded production.
less open subjugation tagonisms and observed.
OD HORAES WOMEN VON OK 18OUT CENT VORN VARY MACKER disputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are and material basis. later to come into their father's property This monogamous family was the women.
TOMEN N that, located and finds its fundamental causes of The family has changed its precise form, functions and relationship to the other institutions of class society according to the different phases of development of the productive forces and the forms of class rule corresponding to In the feudal system for example, all institutions of civil society had a direct political equivalent. Property was in the form of feudal family estates, and society was organised with these estates as its basic economic social, political and legal through the seigneurial courts, dues, services and feudal armies. Each institution of civil society had its political equivalent and the family fitted directly into this. The King was the chief lanc owner, the head of state, his family was the first family of the realm. Family, property, social position, political position all related directly to each other. Family Under capitalism this is no longer the case, the form and function of the family has changed. The attribute of the monogamous family of ensuring the patriarchal inheritance of property, and indeed fixing individuals' relationship to social order as under feudalism, no longer applies at least to the oppressed class - the proletariat. There is no significant property to inherit, therefore the monogamous family as it has existed since the beginning of class society is robbed of its original material foundation.
Moreover, modern largescale industry needs a workforce considerably larger than can be provided by solely proletarians, therefore capitalism has the tendency to draw women out of the home and into the But women's re-entry into public production is in contradiction with their tunctions the home Therefore capitalism is also forced to begin to reverse some of the processes which had taken housework out of the realm of public industry into that of a private service. Functions like the education of children, care of the sick, and the aged have once more started to become part o! socially necessary public industry, rathei than simply private service performed by women unpaid at home.
Work In fact we can go so far as to say tha capitalism begins the work of undoin the monogamous tamıly and thereb begins the work of the liberation But capitalism does not take mon than the first steps in this direction Because, while the pressure to undermin the monogamous family is built int capitalism a contradictory tendency a even more powerful. Capitalism, adop the form of the monogamous family in herited from previous social condition and uses it for its own purposes, for th reproduction of labour power.
This is the specific function of th monogamous family under capitalism through which the individual famil labour power is produced and reproduc ed. In this manner the family maintain powerful economic function capitalism and the monogamous famil remains a basic economic unit of societ Within the family the worker is brougt up to adulthood, fed and clothed, tend ed when sick, and as an adult his labou power is reproduced constantly throug are tanny The labour necessary to ensure that new generation of workers grows up, an the adult worker is in a fit state to start new day's work each morning, is pe formed within each individual family t women. This is why Engels explaine even with all thee mores hi capitalism makes "The modern dividual family is founded on the open concealed domestic slavery of wome and modern society is a mass compos these individual families as molecules.' For the capitalist class this is a high efficient, and moreover, cheap, system ensure the necessary labour power always available. Therefore while o historic tendency of capitalsm Is undermine the previous material found tion for the existence of the family, it or does this to replace it with another -t necessity of the capitalist class to ensu and reproduction Ine production labour power.
The monogamous family, desp certain tendencies of capitalism to und mine it, shown in the rising divorce ra of single pare families, and the massive entry of wom into paid work, is in its fundamen particularly the domes slavery of women, maintained.
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