Claudia Jones--"Complete emancipation of women is possible only under Socialism."

[Starry Messenger]

10. Aren't anti-capitalistic economic issues also social issues?

Isn't that why it's called "Socialism"?

"Under capitalism, the inequality of women stems from exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class. But the exploitation of women cuts across class lines and affects all women. Marxism-Leninism views the woman question as a special question which derives from the economic dependence of women upon men. This economic dependence as Engels wrote over 100 years ago, carries with it the sexual exploitation of women, the placing of woman in the modern bourgeois family, as the proletariat' of the man, who assumes the role of 'bourgeoisie.'

This is an important point, because women (and their offspring) were one of the first forms of private property (along with cattle herds). We've suffered from being economically deprived and behind ever since, in a form of primitive accumulation of our own labor and potential wealth that is still going on to this day. Oppressing us is what helps make capitalism work. I'm not sure how that can just be hand-waved away. That's a "substantive" issue that needs to be dealt with. Engels certainly thought so, since he devoted an entire book on the rise of the family throughout history, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02c.htm

Thus, on the one hand, in proportion as wealth increased, it made the man’s position in the family more important than the woman’s, and on the other hand created an impulse to exploit this strengthened position in order to overthrow, in favor of his children, the traditional order of inheritance. This, however, was impossible so long as descent was reckoned according to mother-right. Mother-right, therefore, had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was. This was by no means so difficult as it looks to us today. For this revolution – one of the most decisive ever experienced by humanity – could take place without disturbing a single one of the living members of a gens. All could remain as they were. A simple decree sufficed that in the future the offspring of the male members should remain within the gens, but that of the female should be excluded by being transferred to the gens of their father. The reckoning of descent in the female line and the matriarchal law of inheritance were thereby overthrown, and the male line of descent and the paternal law of inheritance were substituted for them. As to how and when this revolution took place among civilized peoples, we have no knowledge. It falls entirely within prehistoric times. But that it did take place is more than sufficiently proved by the abundant traces of mother-right which have been collected, particularly by Bachofen. How easily it is accomplished can be seen in a whole series of American Indian tribes, where it has only recently taken place and is still taking place under the influence, partly of increasing wealth and a changed mode of life (transference from forest to prairie), and partly of the moral pressure of civilization and missionaries. Of eight Missouri tribes, six observe the male line of descent and inheritance, two still observe the female. Among the Shawnees, Miamis and Delawares the custom has grown up of giving the children a gentile name of their father's gens in order to transfer them into it, thus enabling them to inherit from him.

Man's innate casuistry! To change things by changing their names! And to find loopholes for violating tradition while maintaining tradition, when direct interest supplied sufficient impulse. (Marx.)

The result was hopeless confusion, which could only be remedied and to a certain extent was remedied by the transition to father-right. “In general, this seems to be the most natural transition.” (Marx.) For the theories proffered by comparative jurisprudence regarding the manner in which this change was effected among the civilized peoples of the Old World – though they are almost pure hypotheses see M. Kovalevsky, Tableau des origines et de l'evolution de la famille et de la propriete. Stockholm, 1890.

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glozed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.

The establishment of the exclusive supremacy of the man shows its effects first in the patriarchal family, which now emerges as an intermediate form. Its essential characteristic is not polygyny, of which more later, but “the organization of a number of persons, bond and free, into a family, under paternal power, for the purpose of holding lands, and for the care of flocks and herds.... (In the Semitic form) the chiefs, at least, lived in polygamy.... Those held to servitude, and those employed as servants, lived in the marriage relation.” {Morgan, op. cit., p. 474}

That whole book is great.

The special problems of women are Communist issues. I'm going to have to disagree with the guy who calls himself a communist who said that they were "social issues", by which I'm guessing he means mere petty bourgeois bagatelles to more important things that concern "serious men" like him.

edit: Thank you for reading the blog!

One more edit, sorry. I thought this quote was apropos:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch02d.htm

Our jurists, of course, find that progress in legislation is leaving women with no further ground of complaint. Modern civilized systems of law increasingly acknowledge, first, that for a marriage to be legal, it must be a contract freely entered into by both partners, and, secondly, that also in the married state both partners must stand on a common footing of equal rights and duties. If both these demands are consistently carried out, say the jurists, women have all they can ask.

This typically legalist method of argument is exactly the same as that which the radical republican bourgeois uses to put the proletarian in his place. Origin of the Family, Ch. 2, Frederick Engels