Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.13
Workers of the world, unite!
MARCH 8: FOR THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION, AGAINST INTERCLASSISM ON THE WOMEN'S QUESTION
Proletarian women: against all interclassism
The bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie raise the banner of interclassism by stamping on it the "women's issue" to declass proletarian women, with issues such as abortion, the "wage gap", family life, sexual harassment or "gender violence". Treated from the point of view of the bourgeois philistine and completely detached from their material base, the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie create a separate category, a specific struggle that would only affect women, to separate the working class into categories and subcategories with problems that should be solved separately. And there is also no shortage of those who try to give a "class" character to interclassism.
The bourgeoisie and capitalism are neither "macho" nor "patriarchal": the development of capitalism is perfectly compatible with the exercise of the functions of class domination by women and only a blind person could not see it. Feminism today is not even a movement of the "women" of the bourgeoisie, it is a movement protected and sponsored by the entire bourgeoisie and its State. It is a movement of the capitalist class.
Capitalism and proletarian women
The abuses suffered today by the women of the proletarian class are genuinely capitalist. Capitalism has as its premise the violent separation of producers from the means of production (original accumulation) and the massive displacement of populations through the expulsion from their land. With the introduction of modern industry, capitalist development has eclipsed the farming and agriculture that can be practiced by isolated families. Capitalism has destroyed the patriarchal family and patriarchal relations imposing the forced dissolution of the family for the working class but keeping it self-interestedly within the domestic context, imposing that all members of the working class family have to sell themselves as wage slaves, being all of them equally exposed to forced unemployment and making the supremacy in the relations no longer of " the man " but of that who brings more to the family economy (be it the woman, the children...), a fact which is still as detestable as when it was mostly the man who played this role), commodifying more and more the domestic tasks (care of children and the elderly, restaurants, supermarkets, shopping, cleaning...), taking the proletarian woman out of the domestic sphere to throw her into the industrial armies as a waged worker, etc.
And all this, no matter how much it may bother feminism, is a demonstration that capitalism develops in its bosom the bases for the socialization of the means of production and reproduction and, therefore, the bases of the new society that only the communist revolution will be able to develop in fullness outside of family and mercantile schemes, breaking the chains that tie them to their mercantile character and private economy.
The anachronism of pretending to resurrect the patriarchy, dead and buried by the capitalist system, pointing it out as responsible for the evils of this society, specifically for the evils of women (of all classes), only aims to perpetuate this criminal and obsolete system that is capitalism.
True emancipation: communism
“The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins. (…) Public catering establishments, nurseries, kindergartens -- here we have examples of these shoots, here we have the simple, everyday means, involving nothing pompous, grandiloquent or ceremonial, which can really emancipate women, really lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life. These means are not new, they (like all the material prerequisites for socialism) were created by large-scale capitalism.” (Lenin, From A Great Beginning, 1916).
Only the proletariat, organized into a class and therefore into a political party (Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848) can carry out the overthrow of bourgeois society, by means of revolutionary violence against the class of exploiters and by means of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In its struggle for the society of species it will not allow attitudes inherited from rotten capitalism that are aimed at damaging the social organism, which include domestic violence inherited from class societies, sexist and bullying attitudes, and the body-damaging use of toxic substances.
This intransigence towards attitudes characteristic of class societies is not something that communists leave for a posthumous future. The workers' movement today must necessarily reject any sexist attitude and abuse in the workplace and in working-class environments, whoever it may come from, both men and women. And this, as well as the rejection of domestic violence, can only be encouraged in a fiercely anti-bourgeois environment linked to the anti-capitalist struggle and for communism, in which the deepest HATE towards private property and bourgeois relations of production is instilled and in which the struggle against these abuses is instilled by means of FELLOWSHIP and SOLIDARITY at any cost among the proletarians, who form a single CLASS without distinction of sexes, ages, languages or races.
The labor-power commodity and abortion
We categorically state that, under the present conditions of wage slavery, it is an imperative duty for all members of the working class of both sexes to fight to prevent the class of modern slaveholders from having the slightest possibility of interfering in the decision of working-class women to become pregnant or to have an abortion at any given moment.
The position of Marxism has always been clear: “It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc.” (Lenin, The Working Class and NeoMalthusianim, 1913). The victorious Bolshevik revolution in Russia, politically proletarian, was the first and only example in history of full legalization of abortion by the State in 1920. "As long as the vestiges of the past and the difficult conditions of the present force some women to have an abortion, (...), it is resolved: "I. Abortion, the termination of pregnancy by artificial means, shall be performed free of charge in state hospitals, where women enjoy maximum safety in the operation." (Decree of the People's Commissariats for Health and Social Welfare and for Justice in Soviet Russia, April 1920).
It was a characteristic trait of the Stalinist counterrevolution, the persecution of homosexuality, the prohibition of divorce and abortion in 1936. All this to guarantee the flesh to exploit for the development of capitalism in Russia through State industrialism and the cannon fodder for the imperialist war that was brewing for the new repartition of the world, a repartition that Stalinism carried out first with Germany and then with the USA and England, switching imperialist sides in the middle of the war.
Militarism and feminism
It is not by chance that one of the icons of feminism is the image of "Rosie the Riveter" with the slogan "We can do it!", propaganda by the US "War Industry Coordinating Committee" during the II imperialist slaughter, to enlist working women (and especially those of the "middle classes") in the war effort.
Not by chance either, feminism also erects as its undisputed icon the suffragette movement, a movement that fought for bourgeois women to be able to vote within the framework of census suffrage. This bourgeois movement, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) at the outbreak of the first world slaughter changed the name of its newspaper "The Suffragettes" for the patriotic "Britannia" under the slogan "For King, for Country, for Freedom", to enlist women in the defense of English capitalism in the imperialist war. They were not alone. The syndicalist G. Hervé changed the name of his magazine "La Guerre Sociale" to "La Victoire", just as Mussolini, relying on the anarchist-chauvinist Kropotkin, defended participation in the imperialist war and just as social democracy betrayed the Basel Manifesto and turned with arms and baggage to the defense of its own bourgeoisie.
All the revolutionary attempts against the First World War were based on the rupture of unity with one's “own” bourgeoisie, therefore, whoever defends the ties between classes (with any reason: race, sex, language, nation) defends the defeat of the proletarian revolution.
The current powder keg of capitalism
The capitalist system is caught between the rupture of the repartition of the world, the overproduction of capital and the exacerbation of the commercial war that leads to military war.
What is the role of the proletarian women in this situation?
“The whole of social life is now being militarized. (…) How will proletarian women oppose this? Only by cursing all war and everything military, only be demanding disarmament? The women of an oppressed and really revolutionary class will never accept that shameful role. They will say to their sons: “You will soon be grown up. You will be given a gun. Take it and learn the military art properly. Proletarians need this knowledge not to shoot your brothers, the workers of other countries, as is being done in the present war, and as the traitors to socialism are telling you to do. They need it to fight the bourgeoisie of their own country, to put an end to exploitation, poverty and war, and not by pious wishes, but by defeating and disarming the bourgeoisie.” (The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution, Lenin, 1916).
As in all the great struggles and revolutions that the working class has undertaken, the role of the proletarian woman is alongside the rest of her class, against the defenders of capitalism:
“A certain bourgeois observer of the Paris Commune, writing to an English newspaper in May 1871, said: “If the French nation consisted entirely of women, what a terrible nation it would be!” Woman and teenage children fought in the Paris Commune side by side with the men. It will be no different in the coming battles for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Proletarian women will not look on passively as poorly armed or unarmed workers are shot down by the well-armed forces of the bourgeoisie. They will take to arms, as they did in 1871 (…)” (The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution, Lenin, 1916).
The task of the communists
Task and function of the communist militancy is to fight against all attempts to divide the working class and to assimilate the exploited women with the exploiting women, denouncing all campaigns that seek to equate the exploited class with the exploiting class and that therefore seek to hide the radical solution to the miseries and exploitation of the working class: the international communist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
And what kind of relationships will emerge in a classless society?
We will respond with Engels: “What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. When these people are in the world, they will care precious little what anybody today thinks they ought to do;” (Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884).
Necessary conditions: the abolition of private property, of the mercantile regime and of wage labor; the socialization of the means of production and reproduction and, with them, the elimination of the domestic sphere.
This is what communists fight for and this is what we call upon both women and men of the proletarian class to fight for.
FOR THE ANTI-CAPITALIST SOCIAL REVOLUTION!
FOR COMMUNISM!
INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST PARTY – “THE INTERNATIONALIST PROLETARIAN”/”EL COMUNISTA”/”PER IL COMUNISMO”
March 8, 2024 – pcielcomunista.org – @pcielcomunista