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Workers Vanguard No. 1150 |
8 March 2019 |
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TROTSKY |
LENIN |
For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
(Quote of the Week)
In commemoration of International Women’s Day, we reprint below an excerpt from a book explaining the program of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), written two years after the October Revolution smashed capitalist rule in Russia. Bolshevik leaders Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky addressed women’s oppression and how it was intrinsic to capitalism. They also laid out how the early Soviet workers state, despite material scarcity and devastation by imperialist and then civil war, took strides to free working women from the burdens of child-rearing and the institution of the family, the central source of women’s oppression.
The working woman in capitalist society is peculiarly oppressed, peculiarly deprived of rights. In all matters she has even less than the beggarly rights which the bourgeoisie grants to the working man. The right to the parliamentary vote has been conceded in a few countries only. As regards the right of inheritance, woman everywhere receives the beggar’s portion. In family life she is always subject to her husband, and everything that goes wrong is considered to be her fault. In a word, bourgeois democracy everywhere exhibits as regards women laws and customs which strongly remind us of the customs of savages, who exchange, buy, punish, or steal women just as if they were chattels, dolls, or beasts of burden. Our Russian proverb runs, “A hen is not a bird, and a woman is not a person”; here we have the valuation of a slave society. This state of affairs is extremely disadvantageous to the proletariat. There are more women than men amongst the workers. It is obvious that the struggle of the proletariat must be greatly hindered by the lack of equality between the two halves of which it is composed. Without the aid of the women of the proletariat, it is idle to dream of a general victory, it is idle to dream of the “freeing of labour.” For this reason, it is greatly to the interest of the working class that there should be complete fighting comradeship between the female and the male portions of the proletariat, and that this comradeship should be strengthened by equality. The Soviet Power is the first to have realised such equality in all departments of life: in marriage, in the family, in political affairs, etc. In all things, throughout Soviet Russia, women are the equals of men....
The aim of the Soviet Republic and of our party must be, to deliver working women from such slavery, to free the working woman from these obsolete and antediluvian conditions. The organisation of house communes (not places in which people will wrangle, but places in which they will live like human beings) with central wash-houses; the organisation of communal kitchens; the organisation of communal nurseries, kindergartens, playgrounds, summer colonies for children, schools with communal dining rooms, etc.—such are the things which will enfranchise woman, and will make it possible for her to interest herself in all those matters which now interest the proletarian man.
In an era of devastation and famine, it is, of course, difficult to do all these things as they ought to be done. Nevertheless, our party must in this manner do its utmost to attract the working woman to play her part in the common task.
—Nikolai Bukharin and Evgeny Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism (1920)
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