The Partisan Editorial Board introduce Partisan! #7.
Communists and Marxists have attempted to ‘resolve’ the women’s question for quite some time, going as far back as Marx and Engels. What is the women’s question? Are women a question to be answered? It is antiquated wording for the ‘problem’ of women’s role in modernity (and you can blame 18th century thinkers for coming up with the label).
The ‘problem’ of course being their participation in modern society, removed from their ‘traditional’ roles in the household as the property of men. While women won suffrage (the vote), along with other positive reforms (economic independence, employment, some level of reproductive rights), they remained shackled in the household.
The participation of women in industrial labor throughout the early 20th century rapidly advanced the women’s question. No longer could bourgeois society relegate women to the sidelines – both world wars showed the unviability of keeping women in their traditional roles (seen and not heard).
Today in Australia we live in what appears to be a society where the women’s question is solved. Women are no longer bonded to their husbands (or so we think), women can have bank accounts and jobs, they can hear skirts and high heels, they can be prime minister (but only once). But beneath the veneer of gender equality lies the dark heart of Australian society: domestic violence remains an unspoken reality for many families along with ruthless gendered violence (as of writing, twelve women have been killed in gendered attacks).
This issue of Partisan is focused on the women’s question, in particular the socialist ‘answer’. Included are reprints of two excellent articles: Women’s suffrage and class struggle by Rosa Luxemburg and Sexuality as Work by Silvia Federici. Both give historical contexts to past attempts at ‘solving’ the women’s question, as well as how socialists (in the case of Luxemburg’s article) attempted to do so in the past.
Federici’s article is an excellent piece on how sexuality is another form of domestic bondage for women, a kind of labour women have to do for their husbands alongside other duties (employment and domestic labour).
Attacks against women are also attacks against transgender women and other non-men. State attacks against bodily autonomy, the ability of people to decide for themselves what they do to their body, inevitably wind up being levied against everybody if permitted against one group. For example, conservatives have long attacked abortion and aimed to restrict the rights of women to access abortions, an open attack on their bodily autonomy. But now that conservatives and liberals attack access to transgender healthcare, something not immediately seen as a woman’s issue, it has been allowed to fly mostly under the radar (in mainstream circles).
What is our ‘answer’ to the women’s question? We believe that women’s oppression is intimately linked to capitalism and class society. Therefore, we believe that women can only be emancipated through revolution – the overthrow of capitalist society and the establishment of an emancipated one that has abolished oppression. While liberals may attempt to jab at patriarchy every once and a while, only communists have a serious solution to it. This is because patriarchy is core to class society, and so to abolish patriarchy, we must abolish class and capital.
We therefore support organising women workers into mass organisations, as well as establishing women oriented factions within unions and other workers organisations. This issue also contains the Revolutionary Communist Organisation’s feminist demands as part of its program for communism. Only a genuine unity of the working class, being workers of all ages, genders, religions, nations, can establish an emancipated society.
“The emancipation of women is a core plank in the communist program. As such, communists support the involvement and leadership of women in all proletarian struggles, and support the emergence of organisations and movements that focus specifically on women’s issues—in both cases, we advocate for communist, proletarian politics to take the helm.”
PARTISAN! 