- by Amber Young
- The Guardian
- Issue #2203
No matter who you are in Australia, you’ve felt the effects of the patriarchy.
The system of gender-based inequity runs so deep in our society that it’s impossible to escape.
But if you’re a woman, then your experiences with the patriarchal system will be undeniably more visible and make a far greater impact on your daily life.
Whether it is the gender pay gap, the unequal division of household labour, financial dependence on an abusive partner, or the way in which you’re dismissed or not taken seriously in your work, the patriarchy is always with you.
Capitalism doesn’t exist separate from the patriarchy, instead it adopts its methods and intensifies them to serve the bottom line of the capitalist.
Before capitalism, women were often the property of their husbands, forced into domestic servitude and to provide free labour for the rest of her life .
Now women are also the property of their employers. The unpaid domestic servitude of marriage has been complemented with the industrial servitude of wage-labour.
With women’s entry into the workforce under capitalism, the wages of all workers were cut. No longer can one person provide the means for a family to live comfortably. Many struggle to provide for themselves to live comfortably.
Rather than liberating women from male subjugation, capitalism expanded it. Capitalism is still reliant on the unpaid domestic subjugation of women while also requiring their subjugation in the workplace.
In short, capitalism is merely an extension of the patriarchy, and therefore any attempts at destroying the patriarchy within the bounds of capitalism are doomed to fail.
What then is the solution?
The neoliberals and media class often assert that communism is an evil, authoritarian ideology, where men rule, just the same as under capitalism.
If that is so, why did Karl Marx and Frederick Engels champion the rights of working women?
Why did Lenin proclaim “There can be no socialist revolution, unless a vast section of the toiling women takes an important part in it”?
What of the women’s union in Vietnam which exists to ensure women can access support across the nation?
And what of the women in China where the party has implemented housing and healthcare projects with the purpose of raising women out of poor living conditions, and worked purposely to address the inequities which disproportionately affect women around the country?
It is because communists understand that the working class can not be free unless women are free. That’s both a freedom from capitalism and the patriarchy.
The simple truth of the matter is that communism is a natural extension of feminist thought.
It sees women’s subjugation, not as some isolated oppression that can be fixed, leaving everything else the same. Communism sees women’s situation for what it is, a tool that the ruling class uses to use and oppress women for the furtherance of their own goals.
Rather than attempting to disavow the struggle of the working class in trying to secure crumbs from men, working women of Australia should see that this struggle is our struggle too, join their sisters in the Communist Party and hold high the red banner of the working class, for its liberation is tied to ours.
