V.I. Lenin on Communism and the Emancipation of Women

Lenin was considered, in his time, a champion of women's rights. Of course, Lenin was also a shrewd political operative, and in one of his earliest important writings, What is to be Done?, he urged Social Democrats to:

react to every manifestation of tyranny and
oppression, no matter where it takes place, no matter what stratum or class of
people it affects; [one] must be able to group all these manifestations into a
single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; [one] must be
able to take advantage of every petty event in order to explain [one's]
Socialistic convictions and his Social-Democratic demands to all, in
order to explain to all and every one the world historical significance
of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.

There is some evidence in Lenin's writings on the emancipation of women that his attempts to "take advantage of every petty event in order to explain his Socialistic convictions" may have blinded him to his most significant insights. Lenin presented evidence that the oppression of women and the oppression of the working class were two different, albeit overlapping at times, phenomena. Yet, he glances over this insight in order to squeeze the oppression of women neatly into a dogmatic Marxist paradigm. It is helpful to look at the contradictions that are never resolved by such an approach to better understand the way economic oppression works together and through other forms of oppression to maximize exploitation and retard the potential for change.

"Large-scale machine industry...refuses to tolerate survivals of patriarchalism and personal dependence, and is marked be a 'truly contemptuous attitude to the past.'" At first glance such an assertion seems to run against the contemporary leftist attribution of capitalist oppression and patriarchal oppression to the same reactionary source, but a closer look reveals the truth, or perhaps partial truth, of the above assertion by Lenin. Lenin is suggesting that capitalist production would pay little regard to pre-capitalist social arrangements like the patriarchical family. After all Lenin was being true to doctrinaire Historical Materialism, and such social institutions are mere superstructural epiphenomena that arise out of the economic structure of society. Pre-capitalistic social arrangements, like the patriarchical family, are impediments to the development of capitalism because it removes two classes of persons from the potential labor pool, women and children. The result is a lower supply of commodified labor available to meet the demands of the labor market, and, as anyone with an elementary understanding of market forces knows, a scarcity of supply raises the cost of a commodity including commodified labor.

Another reason that such an argument seems so counterintuitive to the modern progressive is because measures to limit the exploitation of women's and children's labor were seem as progressive regulatory measures in the West. Such measures did alleviate the wanton economic exploitation of women and children as laborers, but they also reinforced the constructed gender and age roles of the pre-capitalistic patriarchical family order. In fact Lenin states explicitly, "drawing of women and juveniles into production is, at bottom, progressive...endeavours to ban completely the work of women and juveniles in industry, or to maintain the patriarchical manner of life that ruled out such work, would be reactionary..."

In The Communist Manifesto Marx suggests that the "traditional family" will become obsolete once a communist social structure had abolished capitalism. Let us quickly run through the dialectical progression of such a claim. As Lenin suggests, the capitalist mode of production cares little for the gender or age of the labor commodity it expropriates in order to produce (not quite true as I will explain later) so long as it is able to perform the necessary work at the lowest possible cost. This fact is in direct contradiction with the patriarchical ordering of the family, which favors men prior to women and the eldest prior to the youngest. So for the proletariat the traditional family is destroyed under a capitalist regime that has laid open the unreality of the old familial constructions. Dialectically this is the emergence of a synthesis within the proletariat class but a contradiction against the bourgeoisie, which retains something akin to the patriarchical family because the mode of production does not require their commodification. Under a communist order the thesis and antithesis of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is synthesized into a new family structure whose seeds were borne in the latter stages of capitalism, as was illustrated by the breakdown of the proletariat family. Hopefully that was clear, the patriarchical family as a pre-capitalist social "superstructure" will be reordered partially under capitalism and then the dialectic will complete its movement when it arrives at communism and patriarchy has been thoroughly crushed.

Why has this not begun to be realized as we advance in late capitalism? Well, arguably in the lower strata of society the traditional family has almost completely broken down, and it is in the ideology of the middle class where it still "lives" if you wish. Still there is more to be said. Capitalist economic exploitation has found a willing partner in patriarchical gender and age exploitation. Capitalist production and the surplus value capital appropriates from exploited labor has an additional goal besides expanding the labor pool, which globally lowers the value of the labor commodity. In addition, capitalism seeks on an individual basis, in each individual relationship between owner and laborer, to keep the costs of that specific labor commodity down. The two goals are advanced by working in and through the oppressive relationships of patriarchy. Instead of destroying the patriarchical family order, it is most profitable to move such an oppressive set of relations into the economic realm. By doing so you have not just expanded the labor pool, but you have created a sub-class within the working class whose labor value is artificially held down by ideology. Furthermore, by creating a lower wage sub-class within the class of wage laborers you have created competition within the working class itself where the male sub-class feels threatened in a two-fold manner: 1) by the availability of an able sub-class of labor that demands a lower wages and creates a higher surplus value for capital, and 2) by reducing the substantial reality of patriarchy and maintaining its ideological form, you create a threat to the social superiority of men in their gender relations with women.

Capitalism relies on peripheries to keep the cost of labor down, and these peripheries need not always be national or geographical. Similar borders are drawn all over the social landscape of a given society creating a periphery out of race, gender, age, nationality, religion, etc... By lumping all these different forms of oppression under the monolithic Marxist paradigm of economic oppression socialists have helped perpetuate these other forms of oppression, and they have failed to educate the working class as to how such biases and power relations are counter to their long-term interest in economic emancipation. Marx's dialectic is like a bird's eye view of the societal landscape where only the largest items stand out. Upon closer inspection there are countless micro-dialectics that are working within and through the economic materialistic dialectic whose sum total has been powerful enough to fully thwart the march toward a rupture in the capitalist structure.

To better illustrate we return to the example of patriarchy in the working class of a capitalist society. By taking the ideological form of patriarchy and largely sapping it of its substance the capitalist class was able to set the working class against itself and thus prevent the unity that Marx foresaw as being the inevitable result of large-scale and socialized production. Within the working class you now have the patriarchical and short-term economic-corporate interests of the male sub-class set against the interests of women to go beyond patriarchy and to advance their short-term economic corporate interests. You have a micro-dialectic that must be overcome in order to achieve and sense of unity between men and women members of the working class, and this is just one of many micro-dialectics that result from the opportunistic exploitation by the capitalist structure of pre-capitalist ideologies to artificially deflate the value of labor.

Another example is the racial ideology that accompanied the pre-capitalist slave economy in the American South. It is evident to anyone who takes even the most cursory glance that any factuality of such an ideology has been completely disproven. What I mean is, regardless of the conceptual proclamations of race ideology, it is clear that racial orderings are artificial. Again though, there is an artificial deflation of the value of labor performed by racial minorities which creates another sub-class to compete for wages within the working class, and this sub-class cuts across, or intersects, with the aforementioned gender sub-class. You are provide white men and women with the tension of reinforcing the formal ideological aspect of racial oppression while ameliorating its substantive component; so they feel the ingrained ideological drive to maintain racial superiority in society while pursuing their short-term economic interests in the relations of production. These examples can be recounted ad infinitum I fear, which suggests that there are an incalculable number of tensions within the working class, which is an international class, before such a group is united enough for a thorough and final move toward socialism. Until these tensions are overcome they will be ready-made obstacles to the success of any socialist society.

I suggest that a strategic approach should place an immediate priority on confronting these social manifestations of oppression before moving on to the larger issue of economic oppression and not the other way around. Lenin was so saturated in Marxist dogma that he could not see that he had stumbled on evidence that challenged the traditional "structure-superstructure" formulation. Capitalism was programmed from the outset to maintain aspects of pre-capitalist social arrangements when such arrangements helped to produce a greater surplus value. It has been an added benefit to the maintenance of capitalism that these social arrangements have also placed numerous difficult, perhaps insurmountable, obstacles in the path of the emancipation of the working class. In effect, capitalism has created a bigoted Frankenstein out of the working class that perpetuates its own domination.