The dialectical materialist approach to the question of the exploitation
of women
Rajani X. Desai
May 1993
-- the dialectical materialist approach to the question of the exploitation
of women
(Note by Rajani X. Desai presented at the seminar on "Women's Liberation
and Class Struggle" organised by the All India League for Revolutionary
Culture--the AILRC.--at Patna on 14-15 May, 1993.)
Comrades,
The following is only a note, not a full-fledged paper.
We are assembled here today not merely for academic debate on the question of women, but to assert the power of women for revolutionary change (including for their own liberation) and to consolidate the strength we already have.
Assertion and consolidation involve two processes: positively building for what we want, and clearly demarcating from what we do not want.
We are about half the population. We live in a society in which the status of families is determined by the property they have and our status by the families to which we belong. The overwhelming majority of families live under severe exploitation, without security of job, land, or means of subsistence and without a decent livelihood--whether in the countryside or in the cities. Most of us belong to these families. It is true that within these exploited, wretched families too we are assigned, over thousands of years, an inferior miserable status. But now our ambition is not limited to gaining equality within such ground-down families. Certainly we would like equal status within the existing families too. But that is because we want equality with the men in the ultimate society liberated from exploitation and from the oppressive institution of private property. And so right now we want to be free to be equals in the fight for that liberated society. And we know that in the process of that protracted fight, by participating in that fight, we women will acquire democratic power step by step to assert our rights, not just as women, but as people equally with the men.
Equality without this long-term ambition to inherit equally with the men a world free from exploitation and oppression, has no serious content. We do not want only to better share the crumbs with our men. As Faiz said, "Ek khet nahin, ek desh nahin, Hum saari duniya mangenge". We want more for us all: we want freedom to be more productive and to invest the surplus we then produce in a way that is best for our long-term interest. We want that freedom for our men too. We have a common interest there with our men; and we have a contradiction with our men insofar as they do not see that we need freedom and respect so that we too can organise together with them to free ourselves from the present stranglehold of the landlord, the moneylender, the contractor) the revenue officials, the courts, the police and military.
So our fight against the landlord the moneylender, the employer, etc., is primary. It is our main fight. It is antagonistic, in that without demolishing their present status, their control of the means of production and therefore control over our lives, our lot cannot improve. Our struggle with the men who live with us and stand with us in -that fight is non-antagonistic, in that, both we and our men would gain by we women winning a better status and a greater freedom to fight side by side with them.
This difference, and this inter-relation, we should never forget. Our main
fight is against our exploiters and it is an antagonistic fight. Part of
that fight is against the patriarchal culture that the ruling classes employ
to keep us suppressed. In order to carry on this fight, we must also struggle
with the men and the women of our own class who are made into instruments
of this patriarchal culture. While this struggle in individual cases can
assume fierce and bitter forms, at the general level it is non-antagonistic.
It is non-antagonistic because all of us exploited and oppressed would commonly
gain when we win each step in this second kind of fight. However, while this
second is non-antagonistic and secondary, it is a very necessary
struggle. Because it will free half the fighting force of working people
for participation in the main fight. *
[* "Very few husbands, not even the proletarians, think of how much they
could lighten the burdens and worries of their wives, or relieve them entirely,
if they lent a hand in this 'women's work'. But no, that would go against
the 'privilege and dignity of the husband'. He demands that he have rest
and comfort. The domestic life of the woman is a daily sacrifice of self
to a thousand insignificant trifles. The ancient rights of her husband, her
lord and master, survive unnoticed. Objectively, his slave takes her revenge.
Also in a concealed form. Her backwardness and her lack of understanding
for her husband's revolutionary ideals act as a drag on his fighting spirit,
on his determination to fight. They are like tiny worms, gnawing and undermining
imperceptibly, slowly but surely. I know the life of workers, and not only
from books. Our communist work among the masses of woman, and our political
work in general, involves considerable educational work among the men. We
must root out the old slave-owner's point of view, both in the Party and
among the masses. That is one of our political tasks, a task just as urgently
necessary as the formation of a staff composed of comrades men and women,
with thorough theoretical and practical training for Party work among working
women"
Lenin. Dialogue with Clara Zetkin.]
The women's question is thus a democratic question; and its demands at the present stage pertain to people's democracy: such as equal claims to the means of production, equal say and vote within the movement, rights not to be oppressed.
But I take it that among those of us who are assembled here today are women who take the proletarian viewpoint, are Marxist in their world view, are committed to carrying our society into socialism and beyond. As such they have a greater responsibility. For theirs is a longer view and with it comes the obligation not to lose our way on that long haul. It is important not to lose our bearings. It is important to take stock of our resources --our ideological, political and practical heritage, including on the question of women. And to learn how to carry it forward.
The work of Marx and Engels has three component parts, apart from their contribution to practice: their contribution to the theory of knowledge--dialectical materialism; the application of this theory to discover the laws of motion of human society; and in particular their analysis of capitalist society. While the women's question is not dealt with in a lengthy, exclusive fashion, their work crucially locates the basis of women's oppression and maps out the basic course for women's liberation. (There are several other major questions, too, such as the nature of socialism and communism, which are similarly dealt with in a very brief manner in their work; yet we are given crucial basic indicators and analytical concepts from which we can extrapolate.)
Specifically, the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State traces the historical roots of women's subordination; Wage Labour and Capital and Capital analytically describe and place that part of labour which is actually women's labour, thus implying the strategy that needs to be employed for the liberation of women; and the Communist Manifesto and Principles of Communism (as early as 1848) raise the specific slogans whose fulfillment is required for the liberation of women. (Since then, through practical experience, various further brilliant clarifications are available as in Lenin's correspondence and interviews. However, we have not touched here on the very material contribution by Lenin on specific questions of women's movement. This would be a subject of a separate note because the controversies he treats are essentially those that trouble the women's movement today.)
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State outlines the essence of the exploitation of women, the subordination of the women by virtue of the social demotion of domestic work because of the vast surplus production outside the home by the reigning mode and the social power invested by that surplus to the inheritors of it. With the perspective of the Origin, we can also see the suppressive and repressive role of the family, the head of which must (for survival and betterment within the given mode) bring his family members in line with social mores and customs that serve the very mode that exploits his family and him. Women throughout these early modes remained isolated in their homes: their labour of creating domestic goods and services for family consumption or minor exchange, and their labour of procreation and child-rearing, supporting by such contribution the system that exploited them and their families. The Origin points to the exploitative role of the family, private property, and the State in the various historical modes of production, indicating which class in the main, in each mode, benefitted from this social division (among these three institutions) of the expropriating role. And, again, the Origin projects the course for the future, the major landmarks in the course for ending the exploitation of women's labour and bodies, and the mode of production needed for the final liberation of women.
However, the exact position of woman's indirect exploitation by the exploiter, via her socially eulogised but actually damned role of provider of domestic services and procreator, can be seen in the context of the wage provided to the worker. This concept is precisely sketched in Capital and Wage Labour and Capital by Marx. There, Marx shows how wages are the price of Labour power, how like other commodities labour power too is bought by the capitalist taking into account the cost of its production. Marx shows how the cost of production of labour power is composed of (1) the cost of training, (2) the price of the necessary means of subsistence, and (3) the cost of reproduction whereby the race of workers is enabled to multiply and to replace worn-out workers by new ones. All these together are what is called "necessary labour"--the cost of labour power. The more you suppress and devalue the labour (i.e. lower the living needs) of whoever is daily recreating the worker's labour and is preparing the ranks of future workers to replace him in the labour market, the lower the necessary labour (or labour's cost of production) on these two counts.
The foundations are laid here for comprehending a few crucial principles about women's exploitation.
That is, the capitalist is exploiting the women's domestic work, which is accounted for within these two latter components (viz, subsistence and reproduction), via the worker--via his exploitation of the worker. He pays the worker the "necessary labour", keeping the surplus for himself; the greater the unseen and unaccounted labour of the domestic worker (the woman in the worker's daily life) the lower is the value of the necessary labour paid to the factory worker. In the competition among workers for jobs in the labour market, this component can be suppressed and there are social mores to support that. The inferior education, inferior feeding, self-sacrificing character-promotion for women stand as deathly reminders of this indirect and insidious exploitation.
This exploitation is made easier because it is indirect, unseen, supported by moral exhortations about the family role of the woman. The unpaid labour of the woman is unpaid for by the capitalist. The worker himself is only an unconscious conduit (however immediately oppressive he may be). So it-is important that both men and women of the working class become conscious of this.
This consciousness can be brought in only through class struggle: the best conditions for that are created as women themselves also enter the labour market, and are subjected to super-exploitation (both because their necessary labour is even lower, and because of their even greater social subordination). As this process occurs, they are able to directly trace the expropriation of surplus by the capitalist class. (To a slight extent only, their own social status within the family would improve as they taste elements of economic independence in daily life.) Their contradiction with capital would be exposed by their open social labour. However, the sheer experience of social labour will not spontaneously liberate them: this can happen in the course of class struggle alone.
Thus, while recognizing the antagonistic nature of the contradiction in the capitalist mode--as between capital and wage labour (whether of man, woman, or child)--we must also recognise the subordinate, secondary, conditioned position of the contradiction between men and women. The latter contradiction is not the less poignant and harsh for being a secondary one. All this means is, that the secondary one has conditions created for its own resolution (again through struggle against patriarchy and class struggle) in the course of the struggle to resolve the main contradiction.
We know women are exploited in daily life. Men before Marx and Engels too had written about the exploitation and subordination of women. But Marx and Engels give us the scientific approach to see exactly how: How. the surplus value expropriation by the capitalist mode (and Engels outlines the same as well for the earlier modes) extends its tentacles to the labour of women -- indeed, in the process exacerbating a daily contradiction between working men and women (wives) who are both ground down trying to share the single wage, making the man an instrument of the exploiting class's cultural oppression, and thus dividing the exploited and the oppressed. So Marx places things in the order of their strategic resolution.
Already in 1848, the Communist Manifesto strikes at the root of women's enslavement--their yoke of domestic work and child caring: But even more significant, it gives the slogan of the socialising of domestic work and making child-rearing the responsibility of the future socialist State. In other words it programmes for the destruction of patriarchy and the family for they imply the subordination of women. It further reveals the material base that is being created and that women can bank on to implement such a programme: Unlike classical feudalism, capitalism lays the material foundations itself, first by reducing all relations between labour and capital to those of a cash nexus; secondly, by tearing away from the family its sentimental veil, and reducing the family relation to a mere money relation; and thirdly by bringing in more and more women into the social labour force employed by capital. In this way, by participating in social production, the women face the exploitation of capital directly. The material foundation is thus created for consciousness and struggle against exploitation by bringing the exploiter and exploited face to face. They do not thereby become liberated any more than the men employed by capital do. The key for liberation of women as for men is and remains class struggle.
None of these writings prettifies the relation between man and woman as it is lived out under the various exploitative modes. Marriage is called "institutionalised prostitution", the "economic dependence" of woman is denoted as the immediate obvious reason for her social and personal subordination. Marx and Engels are categorical in seeing domestic labour as isolated, and isolating. They argue that the "emancipation of women will be possible (note: not automatic - RXD) only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social scale, and when domestic duties require their attention to a minor degree". The refusal to acknowledge this material reality is to prettify the isolation and drudgery of domestic labour.
We have to enrich this heritage of struggle on the question of women in concrete situations by our practice, while grasping the basic approach. If the movement has failed, any of us feel, to pay adequate attention to the women's question to date, our task is to set about giving that attention --not to abandon the dialectical-materialist class perspective on the question of women.
If we put the main contradiction and the subordinate one on par, not only do we lessen the chances in practice of bringing the subordinate one onto the path of resolution through proper struggle. We do worse. We equate the worker and the capitalist, both as "exploiters". We invest the worker within his meagre wage, his wretched means, with the power to change an equation without the means to do so. Insofar as we do this we divert attention from the principal antagonistic exploiter with whom the women have no common interest. We defuse part of our striking force against the main enemy and divert its striking capacity on to our ally. Men--working men--do need to free themselves on the question of their women. But the point is they can do this only when they realise (through class struggle) that they need to free their women and themselves from ruling-class, patriarchal, family norms, so that both they and their women can fight the ruling classes and world imperialism directly.