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Marxism-Leninism and Women

Sherry Long-Goff

Marxism-Leninism is a living, growing science. Many people have objected to our characterization of it as a science, out of fidelity to the mechanistic notion of science that preceded our understanding of the dialectical process and the inescapable social and class character of science as an enterprise of human experience and insight. Science is the effort to devise models, synchronous systems for the explanation of any number of natural and social phenomena. Since scientific activity, like all human activity, has a class character, each class requires its own social science. The class character of science implies interested science, and as the history of science clearly demonstrates, the ideologies of racism and sexism have also informed scientific activity. The science of the working class contains the framework for, amonng other things, an anti-sexist ideology, because sexism is instrumental to and inextricable from capitalism.

Our method is based on a theory of value that underpins a comprehensive and coherent analysis of capitalism and a method of practice. For Communists, theory and practice are inseparable. Our method requires the incorporation of objective conditions and the assimilation of new developments in those conditions. Correspondingly, Marxism-Leninism necessitates engagement with and accomodation of new insights growing out of those changing conditions. Marxist-Leninists who have been imperfect in the application of this method, or who have been subject to the developmental deficiencies of their time, have sometimes fallen into the trap of orthodoxy. The natural defensiveness that accompanies a state of political siege has occasionally worsened this unfortunate tendency. It is important to make this criticism at the outset. Orthodoxy, of any kind, and Marxism-Leninism are antithetical. The orthodoxies that have emerged in Marxist-Leninist struggles have led to errors in organizing, as well as amplified a number of false dichotomies. The perceived "tension" between feminism and Marxism is an example of such a false dichotomy.

The insights of early feminism were integral to the macroanalysis provided by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Not being merely theorists, much of their work had a very practical character in the service of active revolutionary struggles. Those active struggles were concentrated at points of industrial production in the sphere of waged labor, and as a consequence the struggle itself developed a very androcentric, masculinized quality that reflected the composition of workers in those arenas. It is important to acknowledge the resulting lack of attention to the unwaged sector of the economy that related not only to support of waged labor, but to reproduction of the labor force, that is, domestic work and child-rearing. It is equally important not to retroject modern insights into history for the purpose of dismissive judgement over a whole body of theory and practice. Nor should we extend that error by transferring it forward in time to the Marxist-Leninist formations of today. Struggles for every facet of emancipation occur when they are ripened by historical development, and the modern struggles for women's emancipation grew directly out of the capitalist mode of production. Given the cultural climate of the time, and the stage of development of the Party as well as the women's movement, the CPUSA has often been the most progressive formation in the country with respect to gender. They had the first woman as a national chairperson of any national political party, stood for structural equality between the sexes from their inception, and put forward women as candidates for high elected office, to include the first African-American women to ever be run for President. That comparative progressivity in the Party is attributable to Marxist-Leninist science. "The chief task of the working women's movement is to fight for economic and social equality, and not only formal equality, for women." (-V. I. Lenin, 1904)

Communists are duty bound to study, understand, engage, and, where appropriate, assimilate insights from the various feminist perspectives, be they liberal, left, or radical perspectives. While these perspectives are necessarily limited, they have been energetic and productive. Communists can not adequately fulfill their mission to unify socio-cultural, economic, ideological, and political struggle without keeping abreast of new developments in particularized theory and practice. Marxism teaches us that social relations are both reflected and reproduced in capitalism, and to clearly guage objective conditions we need to understand the interplay between that reflection and reproduction as it relates to male supremacy.

Equality for women is a central tenet of the Communist Party USA. As we do with all struggles, we emphasize the practical activity that connects theory to real lives, and we try to avoid fueling self-contained, impractical, strictly academic debates that become exercises in theoretical one-upping-ship. We clearly understand that the experiences of women are in many ways distinct from the experiences of men in our society, but we reject the individualistic-subjectivistic notion that men and women exist in separate realities. The individual and society, as well as the subjective and the objective, exist in relation to one another, in a single, whole, and dynamic reality.

Consequently, we reject the idea that theories on gender, race, and other singular perspectives either confront Marxism or replace it as a general theory of value and political practice. The implicit dichotomy in such an assertion is arbitrary in general and misrepresentative of Marxism. The dualistic thinking that results from such misrepresentation is exactly what correctly applied Marxism-Lennism is constantly engaged in trying to overcome. We seek any insight that may be attained through innovative interpretative methods, but practice is always predicated on the principle of unifying theory and practice in order to unify people.

Concurrent with the development of dualism, a parallel dichotomy is emerging on the left over the issue of "identity politics." The very articulation of such splits often has a polarizing effect that creates distracted antagonism and defensiveness, and that polarization in turn serves to blur important distinctions. The characterization of a whole range of politically oppositional activity, especially coming from the singular perspectives of race and gender, homogenized as "identity politics" is just such a confusing and counterfeit dichotomy.

Withdrawal from the mainstream by women and oppressed nationalities, either to enjoy a respite from systemic oppressions (in informal social groups), or to share experience (in support groups), to build political power to confront specific forms of oppression in order to join in larger efforts as equal partners (the Black Radical Congress being an example of this), or even to exclude certain perspectives from study as a deliberate strategy for developing innovative scientific perspectives (a common scientific practice), must be differentiated from the minimalism of single-issue politics that characterizes liberal feminism (in which economically comfortable women contest with economically comfortable men for power) or black capitalist-integrationism (in which economically comfortable blacks contest with economically comfortable whites for power) or black capitalist-separatism (in which a black bourgeoisie attempts to replicate for its own benefit the class character of the larger society).

The first set of examples are practices that tend to strengthen the development of oppositional forces (as a form of caucus) and serve as a bridge to a more global (class) consciousness. The latter both weaken broad opposition and tend toward parochial perspectives that can be "bought off." Note how Disney Corporation has accomodated single-issue lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered (LGBT) activists with gay friendly employment policies in this country, while the corporation continues to mass produce sexist, racist, and capitalist-imperialist drivel for young and old, and viscously exploit tens of thousands of starvation-wage employees abroad. LGBT activists who see their struggles as part of a more general fight over who-is and who-is-not in control of society's means of production (the basis of class struggle) have not been siphoned off in their opposition to Disney's overall labor practices.

Even more insidious than the tactical co-optation of interest-group political players is the ability of capitalism, through its own internal logic, to mass produce sub-culture and sell it as a commodity. "You've come a long way, baby." Herbert Marcuse (Repressive Desublimation) and Audre Lorde (Uses of the Erotic) have both written insightfully about the infinite creativity of capital in converting potentially oppositional personal, social, and cultural energy into a mechanism for strengthening consumer-capitalism. Capitalism will sell a lifestyle, sell a rebellious pose. Capitalism always attempts to commodify needs.

On the other hand, the rejection of all singular perspective politics and studies as "identity politics" runs the risk of overlooking much that is important in singular studies, and much that is essential work (for all of us) against bigotry. This kind of rejection, too common among those who think of themselves as an "old guard," is analogous to opposing a field of scientific study to the body of scientific principles that emerge from those studies, or even to our synthesized understanding of the world growing out of understanding those principles.

It is a non-sequitur to "confront" Marxism-Leninism with singular perspectives. This business of confronting Marx grows out of the general confusion engendered by the post-McCarthy and post-modernist theoretical principle referred to whimsically as ABC (anything but communism). Marxism-Lennism aims at a set of totalized revolutionary principles. That in no way opposes it to the insights of ethnic studies, economics, political science, women's studies, or anything else. Correctly applied, Marxism-Leninism assimilates them into the body of revolutionary theory and practice.

The philosophical foundation of Marxism-Leninism, historical materialism, points to the pre-capitalist subordination of workers, generally, and women, specifically, but it differentiates between the character of those forms of subordination. Medieval patriarchy, as an essential part of feudal structure, pre-existed capitalism and conditioned its development. But the social relations of capitalism transformed relationships between men and women in ways that make male supremacy today both indistinguishable from capitalism (as a separate, extricable system) and distinct from Medieval patriarchy in significant ways aside from the shared characteristic of domination-dependence. "It was only the capitalist mode of production which created the societal transformations that brought forth the modern women's question by destroying the old family economic system..." (-Clara Zetkin, German Communist, 1906)

To understand a phenomenon, one needs to get at its instrumentality. Animals experience sexual desire in powerful ways, often heedless of its biological instrumentality. But that desire is an outgrowth of biological necessity; the biological necessity is not an outgrowth of desire. Regardless of the permutations of that desire, or the creative applications of that desire, or the subjective experience of that desire, it remains grounded in biology. In the same way, social relations are grounded in necessity. The most basic deliberative human activity is work, and the organization of productive activity is the single most powerful determinant of the structure of social relations, including between women and men, between men and men, and between women and women.

As the capitalist economy germinated, it took women and children in their agrarian homes and put them to the tasks of cottage industries. Later, it transferred them to factories. Eventually, women were returned to the home where they could more effectivley engage in the unpaid support activity of domestic labor and the unpaid reproductive activity of bringing up new replacement workers, while men were put in the factories. The very stucture of the family changed with each successive transformation of the means of production. We see, even now, with the requirement of a more mobile workforce to adapt to rapid changes, and with the changes in communication and transportation, how these factors have altered the character of families. The expectations women confront are certainly oppressive, but the specific nature of that oppression is qualitatively different than it was for women 10 years ago, 100 years ago, and 1000 years ago. "The social relations of reproduction reinforce the social relations of production because they reinforce women's subordination to men in the labor force and provide unwaged labor to keep the costs of the reproduction of labor low (Shelton-Aggar, Theory on Gender, 1993)."

Women in this society, and in the world at large, are subjected to what we refer to as super-exploitation. This term is related to the instrumentality of male supremacy for a capitalist society. It points to what male supremacy does to preserve institutions in the face of pressure for economic emancipation from those institutions. Super-exploitation is the containment of groups who are comparatively powerless (women and oppressed minorities) in the lowest paid, least secure sectors of an economy, to maintain a downward pressure on wages in every other sector. This phenomenon is compounded for workers who are both women and oppressed minorities. This containment requires supporting social, political, and ideological structures.

It becomes advantageous, then, for capitalists to maintain the "social distance" between men and women, and between various ethnicities, through the trappings of prestige and the types of activity that are developed through consumer markets. Expectations--economic, social, and cultural--related to gender and ethnicity are reinforced as a wall against the potentially "destabilizing" marriage of class consciousness and class unity.

Women are subjected to the tactic of division with a particular vengeance, from the lifelong barrage of subliminal and not so subliminal missives that combine the "competition" for men with the notion of an insurmountable physical inadequacy, pitting women not against bosses, or even against men in general, but against one another. This is a perfect example of how a system can simultaneously reflect its divisions and reproduce them. Look at any popular "women's magazines," and note how pre-existing notions of inferiority sell the diet fads and cosmetics and unaffordable fashions, then how they perpetuate the cultural norm of female insufficiency. Ideological support for these norms has been found in longstanding androcentric "science," in appeals to "nature" of one sort or another, and more recently in the heavily subsidized anti-feminist diatribes of people like neo-con product, Camille Paglia, and troglodyte shill, Phyllis Schlafley.

Communists answer the last question by saying that we must uproot capitalism. We do not mean to imply that socialism will automatically erase gender inequality, but that in order to fundamentally and durably restructure human relationships, we have to restructure their foundations, and those foundations are economic. So long as we have an economic system that pits any worker against any other worker, inequality will persist. It is not incidental to the system, but essential to the system.

By socialism, we mean simply that we must eliminate profit as the central engine of change by exchanging private ownership of the principle means of social production with public ownership. To accomplish that objective, we must overcome all forms of working class disunity, and that means we must fight every manifestation of male supremacy with the same vigor as we fight racism. Without social struggle against male supremacy, economic, ideological, and political struggle will falter. The synthesis of these four fronts of struggle is the essence of Communist practice, and of all the social inequalities, gender inequality may be the most deeply rooted in our individual psyches. Steve Biko, a martyr of the South African struggle against apartheid, once said that "the greatest weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

The key to building working class unity in the fight against capital is strengthening and expanding the only working class organizations that confront capital at the source of its power (profit). Those organizations are unions. Unions are the organized core of the working class. Feminist critiques of organized labor have been and, in many cases, remain valid. There is no doubt that the norms of a male supremacist culture exist inside many unions, especially unions that are dominated by male membership. There is also no doubt that the labor heirarchy is overwhelmingly white and male, and that those entrenched in positions of power are often reluctant to step aside. There is no argument that the reactionary past of US labor, a result of class collaboration and anticommunism, was a reality that still contaminates orgnized labor. The AFL-CIO informally excluded women from many positions, and they formally excluded Communists from membership.

But things are changing in organized labor; not as fast as some would like, but they are changing. The popular ouster of the collaborationist regime of Lane Kirkland represented a sea change in US organized labor, which has grown stronger and more militant over the past four years. Organizing budgets are increasing, unions are experimenting with more democratic procedures, community alliances are beign forged, and women and people of color are beginning to occupy positions formerly reserved for men. The president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO is James Andrews, an African-American, and the president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO is Donna DeWitt. The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) has adopted the motto: "A Woman's Place...Is in Her Union!" The anticommunist clause in the by-laws of the AFL-CIO has been removed.

The problems in unions still exist, but Communists do not believe in letting perfection be the enemy of progress. Men in unions now understand that they need women in the unions for added strength to make demands against the bosses. That is the beginning of unity. Women will caucus in the unions to make demands against male supremacist norms, and men will find it necessary to meet those demands. Some men will see the demands as just. Some men will identify with women and make women's demands their own. Unity is a process, and to transform human relations, we have to begin with where those relations are. People learn by participating in the struggle. The struggle for class unity transcends but presupposes black unity, and Latino unity, and gay-lesbian unity, and women's unity. The political component of that struggle has to be for the expansion of the right ot organize, specifically through the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, the fascist-like national anti-labor legislation that was pushed through during the Truman administration to blunt the militancy of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

While we will continue to critically reflect on our own errors in the past, and while we will continue to criticize the flaws we find in liberal feminism and the dualism inherent in some left and radical feminisms, we will also continue to incorporate the valuable insights of each of these tendencies. Moreover, in our present day struggles, the Communist Party USA is in total solidarity with pro-choice efforts from any quarter.

No single issue has a more profound impact on the economic emancipation of women than reproductive choice. This right is under relentless assault from the ultra-right in this country. Even as the formal, legal right to choice has thusfar survived most challenges, the practical reality is that for working class, especially poor, women, this right has already been dismantled by intimidation, lack of funds, lack of health insurance, and lack of facilties.

This is not the only way poor women are being attacked. The general plight of poor women and the feminization (and concurrent racialization) of poverty have accelerated in the wake of one of the most cynical and viscious transfers of wealth (from masses of poor to a few of the ultra-rich) this country has ever seen; welfare reform.

Welfare reform was almost a fait accompli by the time it showed up on the public's radar screen, because the right spent a great deal of money, time, and effort to frame the ideology of welfare reform. Early in the Reagan years, right-wing think tanks proliferated and selected "scholars" were hyped. The message was disciplined and protracted and designed to scapegoat. George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Report in 1965 on the deterioration of the black family were invoked as the scriptures that demonstrated the fundamental deviance of women-headed households, and black women ("the black matriarchy") in particular. This "scholarship" was all the opening that racist and misogynist ideologues needed to legitimize the foundations of an attack on black people and women which has now expanded to poor people in general.

By exploiting ambient racism and misogyny, the notions of the "welfare queen," the "poverty gene," and now even the "superpredator" (a right-wing euphemism for young Black males) have become everyday cultural artifacts, widely accepted and held responsible for a host of ills that can clearly be traced not to single women with children or the children themselves, but to the structural crisis of the capitalist economy. The right succeeded in coaxing many people to accept the twisted logic that single women and their children were not victims of poverty, but the cause of poverty. This powerfully financed and slickly coordinated, decades-long ideological campaign was prerequisite to the passage of welfare "reform" and other entitlements shutdowns.

This was an important issue for the right not just to maintain disunity among the working class, whom it has always feared, but to set the stage for the economic pillage of the entire social service sector to get at ever more critical investment and speculation capital in the wake of the phenomenal expansion of the national debt under Reagan-Bush. It has proven such a lucrative venture, that international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank now enforce the same policy of raiding social services throughout the world, with the astounding claim that is necessary for a nation's economic health. And like it has here, the burden of these so-called austerity measures falls disproportionatley on women.

The mystification of the welfare reform issue is partly accomplished by regarding it as a single issue. The stingy stipend that was provided under AFDC and food stamps merely permitted basic survival, and it did not provide for training or support for living wage jobs. Now that it is being dismantled (instead of expanded and improved as it should have been), stakeholders in the system have run into a number of problems in trying to enter the workforce. The jobs do not pay enough. Child care is unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Public transportation is either inadequate or non-existent, and cars are too expensive. The acquisition of a job, even one that does not provide health benefits, frequently disqualifies the woman and her children for Medicaid.

Communists have a manifold strategy to address this crisis. We need to establish a massive, nationwide public works jobs program to train workers for real jobs at union wages that are directed to the effort to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure and repair the environmental devastation of corporate greed. One of the priority constituencies to receive training and work must be former welfare recipients. We need a guaranteed annual income for anyone who can not work. We need decent, affordable housing to be a priority of projects, and a constitutional guarantee for every person in the nation that they will have a habitable home. We need a single-payer health system, in which everyone in the United States can consider medical care a right. We need to build a nationwide, comprehensive network of rail, light rail, busses, and state-owned and operated taxis at affordable rates, to ensure that everyone can get to and from work, and to radically cut our greenhouse emissions. We need state-owned and state-run professional free day care for everyone who needs it. We need free tuition to all colleges and trade schools. This is the Communist version of welfare reform.

Another suggestion of the Communist Party of the Carolinas, CPUSA, is that, like some countries in Africa, we include a provision in the Constitution that mandates a minimum of 30 percent of all elected offices be set aside in every elected body for women. The mechanism to allow for this type of set-aside would be an electoral system of proportional representation to replace the unrepresentative and undemocratic winner-take-all system we live with today. Proportional representation is widely used in most developed countries, and was suggested in a position paper by Dr. Lani Guinier as a solution to redistricting controversies, for which she was demonized by the right as a "Quota Queen."

President Clinton's quick and cowardly capitulation to this shamefully deceitful campaign resulted in her name being withdrawn from nomination for a cabinet post. We can all recall how he also showed no hesitation in sacking Joycelyn Elders as the Surgeon General for making the alarming assertion that masturbation is a safe form of sex. This is emblematic of the disposability of public figures who are women, especially women of color. Remember the cynical and viscious attack on Anita Hill, where she was villified for daring to report that token front man, Clarence Thomas, was unfit to serve on the Supreme Court because he was a sexual harrasser.

Disposability is fixed on those deemed either valueless or deviant by ideologies of bigotry. That valuelessness translates into severe social costs for women, and women's health is one area where the impact of this neglect is most grave. The predominance of men in all scientific fields, and particularly in medicine and medical research, has combined with anti-feminist ideology to create a whole constellation of crises in women's health.

Generally speaking, the subject of women's health brings to mind obstetrics and gynecology, and those are the areas of most emphaisis for medical research. On the other hand, it would seem preposterous to limit research on men's health to fertility or urology. "Little research has been done on lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, and other conditions that affect primarily women (Ruth Hubbard, Profitable Promises)... ...Meanwhile, conditions that affect women and men in roughly equal numbers...have been studied almost exclusively in men." The latter problem has particular impact on occupational health, where occupational hazards in workplaces peopled primarily by men have been studied much more thoroughly than the occupational hazards that predominantly female workplaces engender.

My own anecdotal experience, having both worked in medical facilities, and having been the spouse of an active duty military person, is that when women do enter the medical system as patients, they are often dismissed in various ways. My spouse, who also worked in a medical clinic, reported male physicians agreeing during in-house training of male auxilliary medical personnel that "the rule of thumb (a sexistly derived figure of speech in itself) is that as patients, all women are liars until proven otherwise, and all women are pregnant until proven otherwise." I myself have been asked, as have many of my acquaintences, when we entered the Emergency Room or clinic, "Is your husband out of town?" The implication was that we hysterical lasses might have been simply undergoing some psychosomatic disorder in response to the stress of not having our man around.

When this is common practice in medicine, is it any wonder what women are put through by the law? Does anyone know of any case where a man who has been the victim of an assault has been questioned on the stand about his sexual activity?

There is no whole remedy in the law, but certainly a key beginning for political progress must be the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. This would give women the force of the highest law in the land to use judicial challenge as a strategy to mandate equal pay for equal work with no exceptions, and to strike down any exclusionary law or policy against women in the military and other forms of public employment. These structural remedies are absolutely essential, because without access to positions of power, women (with progressive men) can not assert the will and the resources necessary to begin the tough work of emancipating women from rape, battering, sexual harrassment, incest, economic blackmail, and the host of other "special" treatements accorded women in our society, who are left vulnerable by prejudice, economic dependency, socialization, and super-exploitation.

Unity! Working class women need unity among ourselves, the unity of sisters. We need unity with our brothers when we share oppressions with them based on race, sexual orientation, or nationality. And we need the ultimate unity of our class, which is faced off against the unreformable predations of capitalism. We can not compromise on any of these fronts, nor can we neglect any of them because they are difficult or imperfect.

Working women of the world, unite! You have a world to win.