Progressive Labor has taken a position on the women’s liberation movement which, to no one’s surprise, parallels their anti-black-nationalism stance. That is, according to PL, the only issues relating to women’s liberation that are valid focal points of struggle are those which are directly and immediately tied to working conditions for working-class women. The main examples of the correct types of demands to be raised are equal pay for women workers, and day-care centers for working mothers.
But a demand that universities stop their discriminatory practices and hire more women as professors, deans, top administrators, etc., is a prime example of what PL labels a petty-bourgeois, individualistic, counterrevolutionary line. Just as PL calls it counterrevolutionary to mobilize Afro-Americans for struggle on the basis of their common oppression as black men and women living under a racist, capitalist system, so women cannot and must not be appealed to and mobilized for struggle on the basis that they suffer a common oppression as women!
PL’s approach to the women’s liberation movement reveals a total ignorance of history and Marxism on this question – on the most fundamental level. For example, the resolution on women’s liberation passed by the Worker Student Alliance faction of the SDS at the June 1969 convention was drawn up and signed by a group which included a number of PLers, and PLers voted for it, indicating that they agreed with its analysis. The resolution is full of errors that would be worth discussing, but one statement stands out glaringly above all others.
In the section dealing with the family we find the flat statement, “The family does not have to be primarily reactionary. We should attempt to attack the bourgeois aspect and make the family a unit for fighting the ruling class.”
The statement is made in the context that the wives of workers can sometimes be organized to support their husbands in strike struggles. This is absolutely true, and unions have been organizing women’s auxiliaries for precisely that purpose for decades. During the great strike battles of the 1930s, for example, the women’s auxiliaries played a vital role. But that in no way adds up to or justifies a statement that the family as an institution is not primarily reactionary. This question is fundamental to a Marxist understanding of women’s liberation.
The classical work on this question is Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. It was written at a time when a few courageous scholars were first beginning to challenge the assumption that the authoritarian, patriarchal, monogamous family had always existed and would always continue to exist. Engels, making use of notes left by Marx, and basing himself on the research of Lewis Morgan, Johann Bachofen and others, proceeded to explain the question PL apparently still fails to grasp almost a century later – that the family is an institution based on the needs of class society in all its forms from slavery, to feudalism, to capitalism, that it did not exist prior to class society, and that it will cease to exist in anything resembling its current form after class society has been abolished. Since Marxists agree that the abolition of class society is on the agenda, and that any institution which serves to perpetuate the rule of the capitalist class is reactionary, the inescapable conclusion is that the family is a reactionary social institution.
Just as there are some “good” individual bosses, there are also “good” individual family members among whom personal relationships are not based on coercion and hate. But the existence of “good” individual husbands or wives, mothers or fathers, sons or daughters does not make the family as an institution progressive any more than a “good” individual boss makes the capitalist system progressive.
To make the example sharper, it might be added that just as some individual capitalists (like Engels!) can be won to the fight to abolish the capitalist system entirely, so individual family members (a category to which there are very few exceptions!) can also be won to the struggle for the abolition of capitalism and all its oppressive institutions, including the family. It is not the family as a unit that will be converted into a weapon against the ruling class, but its individual members who are won to the banner of revolutionary Marxism.
The family system is central to any discussion of women’s liberation because, contrary to what PL implies, male chauvinism and female oppression are not the fruits of capitalist society alone, but of class society in general. Throughout the last 4,000 odd years of history women have been oppressed as slaves, as serfs and as wage workers. But regardless of their class status, throughout written history–which coincides with the period of class history – they have also been the victims of male supremacy as institutionalized and enforced by the family, private property and the state.
The specific form of the family –as the specific form of private property and the state –has varied according to the prevailing level and form of production, but its essence has remained unchanged as class society has evolved. As this stage of capitalism the family serves several key social functions: to shift from society onto individuals the responsibility for care of the young and old; to instill in children the social norms required by bourgeois society, and to police the behavior of children and adolescents. Under capitalism, the family serves to assure the capitalists a regular, stable supply of labor power.
The patriarchal, monogamous family arose at that point in history when man’s productive capacities had developed to the point that the product of his collective labor was greater that his minimal needs of food, clothing, shelter and replacement of tools – that is the first appearance of a social surplus. This meant that some people no longer had to work, but could live off the labor of others. Out of this arose the institution of private property and the division of mankind into classes, those who owned the means to live off the labor of others, and those who did not.
Prior to the development of class society, the forms of social organization were matriarchal, productive property was communal, the state was nonexistent, heredity was determined through the mother’s side, not the father’s, and women held an economic and social position equal to man’s.
But, as Engels explained, all this was changed by the emergence of private property and the institution of the patriarchal, monogamous family. Monogamy, Engels explained, “was the first form of the family based not on natural but cat economic conditions, namely, on the victory of private property over original, naturally developed, common ownership. The rule of the man in the family, the procreation of children who could only be his, destined to be the heirs of his wealth – these alone were frankly avowed by the Greeks as the exclusive aims of monogamy.”
And as a necessary corollary to monogamous marriage came the parallel institutions of prostitution and adultery – and all the neuroses, psychoses and other miseries resulting from the suppression of sexuality that is imposed on each individual from birth.
The terms in which Marx and Engels denounced the reactionary nature of the monogamous family were scathingly accurate.
The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the well-being and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other. It is the cellular form of civilized society, in which we can already study the nature of the antagonisms and contradictions which develop fully in the latter.”
A little later Engels states, “The modern family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman.” While the advent of large-scale industry has opened the door for woman to reenter the productive process and gain her economic freedom, as long as the basic economic unit of society remains the family she is forever caught in the insoluble contradiction that “when she fulfills her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and cannot earn anything; and when she wishes to take part in public industry and earn her living independently, she is not in a position to fulfill her family duties.
What applies to the woman in the factory applies to her in all professions, right up to medicine and law. (Emphasis added.)
Where the man remains the economic support of the family unit, “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 first premise for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry; and . . . this again demands that the quality possessed by the individual family of being the economic unit of society be abolished.
But this will only happen with the abolition of private property, an institution as reactionary as the family which it brought into existence. When there is no need for parents to possess and control their offspring like one more piece of private property; when children are cared for, educated and loved by society as a whole; when housekeeping is turned into a social industry and women are freed to enter the productive world as equals with men – then and only then will women be liberated and free to develop as fully productive human beings.
Marx and Engels dealt primarily with the socio-economic function of the modern family. But 20th century developments in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis have since added voluminous proof of the reactionary function of the family institution in the psychological respect as well. Studies such as those done by Wilhelm Reich in the early 30s in Austria and Germany on the role and importance of the authoritarian family in relation to the sex education of children, and the sexual misery of adolescents; Reich’s studies dealing with the role of the family in relation to the rise of fascism; analyses by Trotsky, Reich and others of the crisis of the family that rapidly emerged in the Soviet Union in the first years after the revolution and the speed with which the Stalinist reaction reintroduced repressive laws on sexual behavior and rights of women – such contributions provide much valuable material for Marxists who are genuinely concerned with the question of one of the most basic institutions of class society.
With the abolition of private property, the authoritarian, monogamous family will not disappear immediately, any more than the state will vanish. Prejudices, habits and education are too deeply ground into human beings for them to be erased overnight. But the economic and authoritarian enslavement of women and children will be abolished, and conditions will be created in which the hatred and coercion and deep antagonisms which are built into the family relationship can be eradicated, in which it is possible for human relationships based on love, care and mutual respect to exist. Far from leading to regimentation of life and personal relations, socialism will provide for the fullest flowering of freedom and genuine human warmth between individuals.
Progressive Labor’s failure to understand the Marxist approach to the family system and the role it has played historically in the suppression of women is fundamental to their inability to comprehend why it is a blow against the entire capitalist system when women begin to organize on the basis of their oppression as women and fight for equality with men.