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	Workers Vanguard No. 998	16 March 2012

TROTSKY

LENIN

Bourgeois Hypocrisy on Women’s Equality

(Quote of the Week)

When the U.S. launched its occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, feminists joined government spokesmen in covering this imperialist depredation with cynical platitudes concerning Afghan women who are horribly oppressed by Islamic fundamentalist forces. Those forces were themselves recipients of U.S. money and arms in the 1980s. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin punctured such bourgeois hypocrisy in an article marking the advances made toward women’s emancipation in the two years following the October Revolution of 1917.

In words bourgeois democracy promises equality and freedom, but in practice not a single bourgeois republic, even the more advanced, has granted women (half the human race) and men complete equality in the eyes of the law, or delivered women from dependence on and the oppression of the male.

Bourgeois democracy is the democracy of pompous phrases, solemn words, lavish promises and high-sounding slogans about freedom and equality, but in practice all this cloaks the lack of freedom and the inequality of women, the lack of freedom and the inequality for the working and exploited people.

Soviet or socialist democracy sweeps away these pompous but false words and declares ruthless war on the hypocrisy of “democrats,” landowners, capitalists and farmers with bursting bins who are piling up wealth by selling surplus grain to the starving workers at profiteering prices.

Down with this foul lie! There is no “equality,” nor can there be, of oppressed and oppressor, exploited and exploiter. There is no real “freedom,” nor can there be, so long as women are handicapped by men’s legal privileges, so long as there is no freedom for the worker from the yoke of capital, no freedom for the labouring peasant from the yoke of the capitalist, landowner and merchant.

—V.I. Lenin, “Soviet Power and the Status of Women,” November 1919