Marxism and the Emancipation of Women

(Quote of the Week)

In honor of International Women’s Day, March 8, we print below excerpts of an article by Clara Zetkin, who played a historic role in the international working women’s movement. Zetkin was a leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party and later the Communist Party as well as a personal friend of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. Marking the 20th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, her article underlines how Marx’s materialist understanding of society laid the basis for a program of women’s liberation through proletarian revolution. Through developing the productive forces in a planned economy, the institution of the family, the central source of women’s oppression, will be replaced with collective childcare and housework as part of an egalitarian socialist society.

To be sure, Marx never dealt with the women’s question “per se” or “as such.” Yet he created the most irreplaceable and important weapons for the women’s fight to obtain all of their rights. His materialist concept of history has not supplied us with any ready-made formulas concerning the women’s question, yet it has done something much more important: It has given us the correct, unerring method to explore and comprehend that question. It was only the materialist concept of history which enabled us to understand the women’s question within the flux of universal historical development and the light of universally applicable social relationships and their historical necessity and justification. Only thus did we perceive its driving forces and the aims pursued by them as well as the conditions which are essential to a solution of these problems.

The old superstition that the position of women in the family and in society was forever unchangeable because it was created on moral precepts or by divine revelation was smashed. Marx revealed that the family, like all other institutions and forms of existence, is subjected to a constant process of ebb and flow which changes with the economic conditions and the property relationships which result from them....

Das Kapital shows most convincingly that there are incessant and irresistible historical forces at work in today’s society which are revolutionizing this situation from the bottom up and will bring about the equality of women. By masterfully examining the development and nature of capitalist production down to the most refined details, and by discovering its law of motion, i.e., the Theory of Surplus Value, he has conclusively proven in his discussions of women and child labor that capitalism has destroyed the basis for the ancient domestic activity of women, thereby dissolving the anachronistic form of the family. This has made women economically independent outside of the family and created a firm ground for their equality as wives, mothers and citizens. But something else is clearly illustrated by Marx’s works: The proletariat is the only revolutionary class which by establishing Socialism, is able to and must create the indispensable prerequisites for the complete solution of the women’s question. Besides the fact that the bourgeois suffragettes neither want nor are able to achieve the social liberation of women proletarians, they are incapable of solving the serious new conflicts which will be fought over the social and legal equality of the sexes within the capitalist order. These conflicts will not vanish until the exploitation of man by man and the contradictions arising therefrom are abolished.

—Clara Zetkin, “What the Women Owe to Karl Marx” (March 1903), reprinted in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings (1984)