Proletarian Reorganizing Committee, CPI (ML)
Base paper for the Central Convention on the aforementioned topic organized on the occasion of 15th martyrdom anniversary of Comrade Sunil Pal at Asansol Bar Association Hall, Paschim Bardhaman, West Bengal on 30th December 2024.
हिंदी में पढ़ने के लिए यहां क्लिक करें।
Introduction
Assaults on women have been rising on a big scale since the recent past.[1] Along with it, patriarchy is also penetrating rapidly in society. With the rise of fascism to power, both are on rise in the most perverted form. Moreover, the new signs are quite alarming and disturbing. They indicate the trend of combining rapes with pornography as disclosed by the recent editorial note of Frontline.[2] It says,
“After the Kolkata incident, Google Trends data for India reportedly showed a spike in searches for the victim’s rape video and for her name in pornography sites, a phenomenon recounted in 2019 too when a veterinary doctor was raped and killed in Hyderabad. The inherent voyeurism of this is unhealthy enough but add to it that the terms “rape” and “pornography” are being interlinked and we are looking at a very sick society indeed.”
It also says –
“culture, via lyrics, memes, jokes, or films like Arjun Reddy and Animal, routinely glorifies violence against women and the sinister idea that violence is extreme love. If we apply the psychologist Albert Bandura’s premise that humans learn behaviour through observational learning, by picking up stuff they see and hear, it is clear how easily rape is learnt as acceptable behaviour—from drinking buddies, from forwards of rape porn and rape jokes, from the rash of films that debase women, and in homes where women are customarily dismissed. The tendency is particularly marked in societies that revel in war culture and macho posturing, signs that are familiar in social discourse in India today.”
Same type of research-based facts had started pouring in after the Nirbhaya rape incident of 16th December 2012 in Delhi, explaining why rapists resort to such extreme barbarity.[3] As inherent in it is voyeurism, it is indicative of a very deep rot – a sign of complete socio-cultural disruption and moral-ideological collapse[4] – of our society. That’s why we saw that there was no let up in such gruesome incidents of violent rapes even after the widespread Nirbhaya protests; even when the heat of these protests hadn’t disappeared completely.[5]
Of course, there is no doubt that it has been engendered, and is being engendered on a daily basis, by the near total decay of the decadent, parasitic and depraving capitalism, and is a result of the fact that today’s rotten capitalism and its pervasive market, in its pursuit of super profits, has focused its target of attack on the female body, apart from labour, the well known target of capital since its inception. The flourishing pornography market is nothing but the result of this, whose precariousness is obvious particularly in the times of rising fascist offensive.
Moreover, we must admit that struggles against patriarchy appear now and then, whenever a particular incident of gruesome rape deeply appeals to our brain and soul, but there are no such struggles going on that attack this rot and the root cause of this rot. Even if there is a struggle against it, it is often forgotten, maybe under the influence of feminism, that such socio-cultural and moral collapse is not merely a socio-cultural and moral phenomenon. Behind it work the interests of crisis-ridden monopoly capital which is hell bent to make this world a living hell for women as well as for all humanity at large. Even in the so-called struggles against patriarchy, it is forgotten that the fight against existing gender relations is in reality a fight against a system of exploitation and oppression based on bourgeois private property, and therefore the fight against patriarchy must be linked with the fight to overthrow capitalism-imperialism and restructure the society on new social relations that will end patriarchy once and for all. Only then its socio-cultural effects, as also the moral-ideological degeneration and degradation associated with it, could be fought decisively and successfully.
Patriarchy and Fascism
Patriarchy under fascism has its roots in the patriarchal outlook present in liberal and democratic viewpoint of ‘nation’ that prevailed in France in 19th century, according to which, “nation was the expression of the rational interests of individual (male) inhabitants of France.”[6] According to Kevin Passmore, Professor of Cardiff University, the first “national socialist” was Maurice Barres, the French novelist in whose mind did the idea of National Socialism originate for the first time. He and latter-day followers of fascism and Nazism rejected the above liberal democratic viewpoint of nation, but not entirely. They accepted the patriarchal viewpoint (according to which nation was the expression of the rational interests of individual male inhabitants) from the liberal democratic outlook and built upon it their own idea and philosophy of racist aggressive nationalism. For Mussolini it was autarkism-based nationalism or national revolution, while for Hitler it was National Socialism which means unabashed eugenicist racist nationalism.
However, it was Benito Mussolini of Italy who for the first time led the idea of fascism from a dormant phase to the arena of practice on a national basis consolidated and institutionalised male chauvinism in society as a distinctive patriarchy. Posing himself as a man of will and action for a thorough going revolution of a new type paid him much in this regard. Beginning with the movement of the Blackshirt Fascists, that staged the ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922 to make Mussolini the Prime Minister of Italy, they established, riding the waves of the above mentioned thoroughgoing national autarkic revolution, a fascist patriarchal totalitarian nationalist state which assigned second-class citizenship to women, according to which women were to look after household affairs including kitchen drudgery in the main, and works such as agriculture which were directly attached with it. For this Mussolini gave the call of food autarky.
However, it was only with the breakthrough of Nazism during the economic, social and political crisis beginning in 1929, its advent to power in January 1933 with Hitler as the new Chancellor, and then finally with the Kroll Opera House session of the last Reichstag in which Hitler wrested the power of making laws without the approval of the Reichstag from the supporters of the then-President Paul Hindenburg on the assurance that his position as well as the existence of the Reichstag would not be threatened, the fascist movement that started in France in 1890s came to be what it really was. The law that enabled Hitler to make laws even if they deviated from the Constitution was known as The Enabling Law. It formed the basis of the racist fascist dictatorship in its fullest naked form. Everything after then did depend on the will of the Fuhrer who embarked upon the path of creating a racial male chauvinist fascist state of the worst type. It was preceded by a racial utopia created by the Nazi Movement which evoked the creation of a racial dream that entailed first of all an unending effort to create the most powerful German Aryan race by subjugating the women merely to motherhood status as well as relegating and confining them to their small area, the home. They were entrusted with the task of bearing and rearing the purest and most powerful future generations of German Aryan race. This was the main task that women were supposed to complete. It led to the maddest and the most inhuman efforts of completely eliminating the Jews and Slavs from the soil of Germany and subjugating all other ‘inferior’ races under the most racist German Empire led by the Nazis and their master – Hitler. It finally led to World War II in which it was ultimately defeated by the USSR and its international allies in 1945, but till then had caused unlimited devastation and destruction mainly in Germany, the USSR, and Europe – the chief theatre of the fascist war of conquest.
However, yet again since the late 1990s, fascism had been able to gradually bare its fangs in different parts of the world.[7] The result is that now in the third decade of the 21st century, we are once again face to face with this monster. We can see it rise to power in different countries, one by one, through winning elections utilizing the bourgeois parliamentary system and, in its own turn, maintaining its control over the same with the help of communal-ethnic-racial hatred-based nationalist campaigns that destroy the very foundation of bourgeois democracy on a daily basis while the different types of aggressive communal narratives destroy the opposition bourgeois parties and rob of their Hindu mass base. And this is happening when, as Kevin Passmore rightly says, fascism is still an “all-purpose term of abuse.” Even today it adopts a macho style, yet it attracts women. It calls upon men and women to follow old traditions, yet it fascinates them. It preaches violence in the name of order, yet even peace savvy middle class people follow it in the name of defence of national security from its external as well as internal enemies.
From the point of view of patriarchy, as Kevin Passmore writes, fascism is indeed the meeting point of feudal patriarchy and the type of patriarchy unleashed by the worst elements of finance capital. That’s why fascism is also termed as the regression of history, a turn towards medievalism, theocratism and monarchism, but led by finance capital. That’s why we see both anti-modern feudal interests and modern big capital interests together interwoven in fascism. Fascism cannot be separated either from the elements of medievalism or the elements of capitalism. But to say that its basis of origin is feudal or large landownership is wrong. Its basis of origin is undoubtedly the ultra-reactionary need of finance capital, that is, the most reactionary, most terroristic, most chauvinist and the most imperialist elements of finance capital.
We know Weberians (followers of the sociologist Max Weber, 1864-1920) blamed the pre-industrial or feudal ruling classes – the large landowners of Eastern Germany or the Italian Po Valley, the Latifundists of southern Spain or the Japanese military caste for the rise of fascism.[8] They argued that these elites were able to exert their hateful influence on the course of national histories because their countries had not experienced a genuine bourgeois and liberal-democratic revolution in the 19th century.[9] But why were they able? Because, these elites had retained their economic as well as social domination, because the tasks that the democratic revolution was supposed to accomplish from below were in actuality accomplished in those countries from above i.e. through Prussian path or landlord-bourgeois path of capitalist development.[10] Kevin Passmore writes that – “These elites used [their monopoly over] education to spread their reactionary values [and those of patriarchy] through the rest of the society, and resorted to ever more desperate means to preserve their [reactionary] positions.”[11] However, what is important to note here is that the reactionary values of these elites merged and got conflated with the reactionary values of the worst elements of finance capital that took recourse to medievalism in order to establish naked fascist dictatorship and finish democracy to keep their rule intact. Similarly, it must be noted that the erstwhile feudal classes who retained their domination in the process of capitalist development through Prussian path were ultimately turned into new rural bourgeoisie even though they retained their old feudal cultural and moral values. In the time of severe crises that many times looked irreversible as the present one, the worst elements of finance capital showed the same tendencies and thus the merger of their anti-democratic reactionary ideas with those of the old feudal class turned agrarian bourgeoisie took place easily.[12]
Weberian approach on the whole was a wrong approach. However it is true that it helped enormously in our understanding of fascism in its social context (as Kevin Passmore writes), especially how it relegates women to homes and to professions solely attached with homes and confines them to kitchen drudgery. Later, this patriarchal nature of fascism got its ultimate destination in Eugenicism i.e. keeping the motherhood status of women intact solely for reproducing the pure ethnic racial nation. It makes us able to understand how old aristocratic classes of Germany joined hands with the captains of monopoly finance capital and together made the accession to power of Hitler and Mussolini possible, who brought back a new aristocracy in the form of a racist fascist dictatorship which was more dreaded than the old aristocracy. It was a complete hell for women, though it is a fact that it was also hailed by a lot of women who accepted pride to solely use their well profound emotions and their status of motherhood to reproduce an ethnic racial nation which would be pure as well as powerful, free of any hereditarian disease and weakness.
What are the main arguments of fascists about women? Their main arguments about women are traditional, the ones which are common among all traditionally patriarchal men and women. Their arguments are the same against what August Bebel, the great German working class leader and theoretician, wrote, in criticism of those who believed that there is no women question as such that exists separately from the general social question. Criticising them, he wrote –
“Many even venture to assert that … woman’s position has always been the same and will remain the same in the future, because nature has destined her to be a wife and a mother and confine her activities to the home. Everything that is beyond the four narrow walls of her home and is not closely connected with her domestic duties, is not supposed to concern her.”[13]
It is a pure prejudice. Bebel writes that it is based on ignorance concerning woman’s position, which was higher than man’s, in the primeval societies. Back then, women were men’s equal. This ignorance is deeply penetrated not only among men but also among women as this has been tutored to them for successive ages through the rule of patriarchy. However, Nazism and fascism are those which, more palatably and more gloriously than any other patriarchal ideology in history, conceptualized woman as a mere object of procreation[14] and institutionised this through state by making them the custodian of a pure, healthy and superior race that led to, not only war against inferior races like Jews and Slavs, but also the most frightening intra-race war, torture and murder of innocent men and women of German race based on divisions within the German race people (men, women and even children) into “worthless” and “valuable” categories.[15] We know that not only Jews, but also “worthless” Germans (men and women) were consigned to concentration camps, sent to murder squads or thrown into conditions of extreme miseries to die.[16] Not only this, Ruchira Gupta writes that,
“15 years old girls of the so-called Aryan race were sent to Lebensraums (hostels where they were raped by Hitler Youth to give birth to blue-eyed blonde Nazi babies as part of massive attempts at Eugenics.) As the promiscuity of the political leaders became public knowledge, and the divorce rate steadily rose, the Lebensraums also opened their doors for unwed or abandoned mothers.”[17]
In this regard, Mussolini’s fascism was different, at least in the beginning. He also relegated women to the home, away from all other fields, and confined them to kitchen drudgery and made them a mere object of procreation, but in a benign manner i.e. by actively encouraging the women to fulfil their domestic role as a mother of many children and the sole care taker of the house as well as making them respectfully responsible for the victory of his policy of food autarky and thus pushing them in this name to take up the national role as the main cooking agents of autarkic Italian foods. For this, Mussolini threw them out of factories, universities and all other fields of society except from agriculture of rice crops. In doing all this, he fell back on the traditional authority of family and religion to enforce biologically determined roles as mother and caretakers. But later, when he came under Hitler’s influence in the late 1930s, precisely beginning with the introduction of the new fascist laws prohibiting racial crossings in 1937, he rather started favouring almost the same eugenicism as that of the Nazis.[18]
So, it is in the nature of fascism that fascists of all hues and cries rule with an anti-feminine zeal inbuilt in them as they are but the representatives of the worst reactionary elements of finance capital that strives for complete control and domination in place of equality and liberty and hence has a general tendency towards historical regression i.e. taking the society back to the period of extreme patriarchy and medieval bestiality. Hence, attacks on women rights and dignity becomes so generalised that they often result in rape and even murder with rape. It becomes a general phenomenon as misogyny and sexism under the shadow of age-old patriarchy, heightened as it becomes in the times of increasing offensive of fascist ideology, take over the society. Rape and violence becomes a day-to-day menace. In short, today’s anti-feminist misogynist politics that targets women has its roots in fascist offensives taking place in the backdrop of ever deepening crisis of world capitalism which is responsible for the present day social and cultural putrefaction i.e. extreme rot and decay taking place in the society the world over. Under the shadow of age-old patriarchy, its natural target is women.
So, what we see is that fascism as a socio-political movement creates a paradoxical situation for women. The particular experience of oppression of women in Nazi Germany proves, more than that in fascist Italy, that fascism (as a social-political movement) makes women not only its victims but also its allies as perpetrators of violence against themselves as well as of the same sex or gender of ‘inferior’ value and race. Consequently, it led women to “craving for submission as well as lust of power” as Claudia Koonz mentions in her book Mothers in the Fatherland (1987). It is rightly said that “never in German history had so many women streamed into any political party, and never has a party so degraded women as the National Socialist Party” i.e. the Nazi Party (Jurgen Kuczynski, ibid). Fascists are able to appeal to the age-old popular prejudices about the public cult of motherhood, emotion and self-preservation embedded as profound inner instincts in women. This made fascists popular among women even though they from the very beginning had declared to expel women from the public life and confine them to private space. It is therefore possible that one can draw this conclusion that it is women who, after having got influenced by fascist philosophy, “discovered, elected, and idolized Hitler” (Joachim C. Fest, ibid). And one can bring history as a witness to this. Hence it is necessary for the present anti-patriarchy women movement to take note of this particular ability in political shrewdness of the fascists. Be it Hitlerite Nazism or Benito Mussolini’s fascism, both ruled women with the help of women while at the same time making laws that relegated them to the home. Both made the woman as the public cult of motherhood and caretakers of home and her man. One did it by falling back on traditional image of women embedded in family structure and its authority, while the other did it in completely naked form, unabashedly. One kept women inside the home to reproduce quantity (in fascist Italy, women were encouraged to have as many children as possible and those having the most were rewarded), while the other did it to reproduce both quantity as well as quality (In Nazi Germany, women were made to keep intact the purity of race and reproduce superior-most of them). In essence, both powers of fascist dictatorships pursued the same anti-feminist policies and common anti-women politics.
Here, at this point of time, it is relevant to hear from Suvira Jaiswal, the well known female historian, who mentions that even when the caste system is aimed to be preserved, the role of women is similar to that of the women in Nazi Germany who were made the custodian of pure race i.e. responsible for keeping the race pure and healthy, although caste and race do not conform to each other as the same historical product or entity and hence the role of women in producing caste is similar but not equal to or same as the role of women in producing a pure and healthy racial nation. However, the real essence of the fact is this: Women are a gender that needs to be forcefully relegated to the background and confined to homes if caste and race is to be kept pure and alive. While dealing with the genesis and history of savarna and avarna caste in her celebrated essay Emergence of Castes and Outcastes: Historical Roots of the ‘Dalit’ Problem (2019), Suvira Jaiswal says –
“In fact, postmodernists have emphasized that there is no point in arguing against caste (pratha) because it becomes a means for the lowest people (Ilaiah 2009: 28) to “mobilize opposition politics” (Dirks 2006: 314).
She further says –
“Whatever it may be, … these apparently well-meaning arguments to maintain caste identities completely ignore the internal structure and functioning of castes. This practice is based on subordinating women and managing and controlling women’s sexuality which is a basic requirement for the reproduction of castes.”
Thus, it is inevitable that the effort to preserve the caste system and revive it in any form will give rise to control over women’s sexuality. We can see here how politics based on re-assertion of caste identity is intrinsically similar to fascist politics and ideology. Jaiswal further writes –
“For example, in Haryana, Jat Khap Panchayats often justify harassment, assault and murder in the name of ‘honour killing’ and no political party is ready to condemn it because it affects the politics of votes. … Such incidents are not limited to any caste or region. It is said that the lower the caste is in the social hierarchy, the stronger is its caste panchayat and it has more power to ostracise people from society, punish them, impose fines on them, etc. … Basudha Dhagamwar has shown how caste panchayats, in total disregard of the law of the land, pronounce verdicts of ‘lynching’ and this applies to the Dalit caste panchayats as well. There have been cases where people have married of their own free will and though these marriages have taken place within the socially accepted caste groups, the consent of the elders has not been taken and in such cases the Dalit caste panchayats have punished them severely – even young couples have been murdered. (Bhagwat 1995). It is not without reason that Baba Saheb Ambedkar talked about total abolition of caste and expressed the view that this objective can be achieved only through inter-caste marriages.”
The caste system is all about maintaining purity of caste from top to bottom and hence it needs to maintain the so-called purity of blood. This is not much different from eugenicist view of the Nazis and the fascists. It is not without reason that there is ample space in fascism for the politics of caste re-assertion. The entire politics based on it and the leaders professing this have been very well accommodated and mastered by the fascists. In India, where caste hierarchy is still rampant, it has put before us a gigantic task in our fight against patriarchy, particularly when all types of regressive and retrogressive offensives are being launched with impunity under the Modi regime, which is not much different from a fascist regime. Let us not forget that fascist offensives combine old patriarchy with racist-ethnic-casteist and communal ideology and thus, preside over the new low of moral-ideological and socio-cultural degradation and degeneration that has crept in society owing to extremely decadent and parasitic capitalism of the 21st century. Let us not decline from accepting this fact that fascism rides the trough of all such decays which means that women’s life will be a complete hell if fascism is not fought and defeated successfully.
From Nirbhaya to Abhaya; Some Nagging Questions
It has not been too long since not just Bengal, but also the entire country erupted in anger following the brutal rape and murder of a 31-year-old young female trainee doctor (given the name ‘Abhaya’) of Kolkata’s R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital on 9th August 2024. The doctors, medical students and the general public of Kolkata rightly opened a battle front against the perpetrators of this ghastly incident. And, on 14th August, a flood of women came out in rage on the streets of Kolkata at midnight with a special slogan on their lips – ‘Reclaim the Night’ – to openly challenge the patriarchy. It was simply heroic. Every such incident must be answered with such protests. Eleven years ago, following another brutal rape of a paramedical student (named ‘Nirbhaya’) that took place in a moving bus in the country’s capital Delhi on the night of 16th December 2012, women had given a similar response with the slogan “meri aawaaz meri skirt se bhi unchi hai” (Don’t see the height of my skirt. Look, the pitch of my voice is even higher) while confronting and challenging patriarchy openly on the roads. However, as mentioned above, such heroic protests raise some very disturbing questions too.
How come such heroic protests don’t produce as great an impulse as is necessary to generate the much required energy to break the monotony of ritualism in such movements and raise the consciousness of people to fight for the social system that will end such atrocities as well as patriarchy once and for all. However painful it may be, we have to accept that in a sense such heroic protests ultimately go in vain. See the “Reclaim the Night” movement. It also didn’t go much far as it couldn’t produce the aforementioned required energy and impulse – ideological-political impulse and push as such, even though some reports claim that it is still continuing and some groups of Bengal are still stirring the society on the central issue of patriarchy.
Whatever be the case, it is a bitter truth, as seen even in history, that such movements often don’t go much far beyond raising demands for making more stringent laws and punishing the perpetrators. However, it must be understood that patriarchy cannot be done away with by making stringent laws alone because the objective conditions of society i.e. the socio-economic structure that makes the implementation of such laws possible, are not present. For this, the present society needs to be changed i.e. reconstituted on a base that doesn’t feed patriarchy and promote atrocities on women. And hence, for this, the present ruling classes of society must be overthrown.
What has been the result so far? The heroic protests against Nirbhaya’s rape and murder gave the much needed strength to the fascists led by BJP (as did the Anti-Corruption Movement), who came to power in 2014. It has to be seen how much the agitation against Abhaya’s rape and murder case will strengthen BJP in Bengal. However, even today this can’t be denied that it has strengthened BJP more than anybody else. Similar is the experience of the huge women protests that took place in Iran in 1978. It ultimately grew into an anti-monarchy and anti-US revolution overthrowing the Shah in February 1979. But, contrary to popular expectations as well as western media’s and even Iranian intellectuals’ anticipations, “it created ‘Islamic feminism’ and everywhere encouraged Islamic fundamentalism, one striving for theocratic power [that would be sometimes] in collusion and [sometimes in] conflict with imperialism.”[19]
It is often argued, and rightly so, that the organisational strength of the revolutionary movement and its constituents is not strong enough to influence these movements to take the correct path – the path that galvanises the anger against the actual culprit i.e. the rule of capital that for its own interests promotes patriarchy as well as heinous atrocities on women. However, it is an undeniable fact that ideological and political weaknesses do have their share in such failures. So, we must be strong enough morally to point out the weaknesses arising from the lack of correct ideological-political orientation, that is more than often responsible for the weakness of our organisational intervention. For example, if our movement doesn’t take in into consideration the very kernel of the differences between Marxist-Leninist approach and Feminist approach towards how to fight patriarchy minutely and carefully, that too, in the time of rising fascism, it is bound to affect our intervention which already suffers from the weakness of organisational strength, and will not bring the desired or intended results. As we alreadyknow that Lenin, one of the great teachers and leaders of the world proletariat, was very cautious and careful about it.He was always keen on highlighting the bourgeois nature of Feminism.[20]
Feminism, which is in essence a bourgeois ideology on women question and which, in all its diversity, is not committed to the negation of capitalism and doesn’t see gender relations as a system of patriarchy (Shahrzad Mojab),[21] takes forward and idealizes not only the structural dissolution but also the spiritual disintegration of family and relations between sexes by conceptualising the idea of freedom or independence of woman as something like atomisation of every single male and female individual into a single completely independent and free identity. This is the natural outcome of feminism’s delinking of gender relations and capitalism and reducing gender to questions of identity and culture (Shahrzad Mojab) that doesn’t feel that real freedom of women lies in abolition of capitalism and bourgeois private property and re-organisation of society on the basis of completely socialised ownership of all the means of productions. Marxists must be aware of this and not fall prey to this feminist portrayal of women’s freedom. The negative effects of this can be well perceived in today’s bourgeois nuclear family which acts as the economic unit of bourgeois society and is the site of all such privation, isolation, atomisation, and alienation of men and women both. This is the final destination of private property; this is what private property historically and thus naturally aspired for; this is the form of family in which private property got its historical mission and form both fully materialised under the rule bourgeoisie. Having reached this destination, every member of society suffers from the feeling of complete isolation and separation from one another. One can see how pervasive this feeling is under the bourgeois rule. Under the bourgeois private property relations, only this could have happened and as such it is nothing but the extension of feeling of alienation of workers arising out of bourgeois social and production relation under the tutelage of private property.
So, while fighting against patriarchy, for women’s freedom and emancipation, we, unlike feminists, must not take forward and glorify this disintegration; instead we must put forward the idea of the higher level of integration of society under socialism-communism where no one will ever suffer from the feeling of alienation and isolation. This is what Marxism, unlike feminism, envisages for mankind as a whole, while fighting against feudal patriarchy, and for the sake of clarity, any patriarchy. We must note what Marx mentions in the first volume of Capital. He talks about ‘a greater economic independence’ of women as the result of opening up of ‘a wider area of employment opportunities’ by ‘changes in the organization of labour’ in which ‘both sexes’ have been ‘brought closer together in their social relations’ and thus introduction of women ‘in socially organized processes of production outside the domestic sphere’ will act as a ‘new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relation between the sexes’ (bold added). What does it mean? It means that we Marxists cannot and must not ever walk in the footsteps of feminist ideology and practice which glorify the dissolution and disintegration of family and relation between sexes, while fighting for independence and equality of gender. We know feminism reduces women question into the question of gender identity as if subjugation of female sex is just a cultural phenomenon. We cannot fight against fascism with this gender independence construction and interpretation. It also goes against the very essence of human relations whose essence, according to Marx, is men-women relationship.[22] Fascism appeals to this, though for its nefarious racist ends, and in the process, turns patriarchy into racist patriarchy. Then, confronted as women are with the severest problem of dissolution of family and relation of sexes under bourgeois order and that of nuclear family as its economic basis, they in vast numbers and majority may happily agree to accept such racist patriarchal appeal and may themselves be ready to be relegated to their smaller world for the very cause of safeguarding the essence of human relations. We have tried to discuss some of its main aspects in the last section of this paper.
However, it would not be in any way less important and relevant to describe what and how young Marx’s thought about the alienation and egoism of bourgeois society as compared to holism and intimacy of medieval feudalism. Marx in his early writings, whether in ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844) or Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), in which he cryptically terms medievalism the ‘democracy of unfreedom’, consistently takes account of the alienation and egoism of bourgeois society and contrasts it with the holism and intimacy of medieval feudalism to better understand his own account of objective of human emancipation which he was grappling with.
“While Marx rejects feudal nostalgia and insists on the revolutionary progress brought by capitalism and liberal constitutionalism, he nonetheless believes that medievalism models a partial unity of political and economic life that ‘true democracy’ will restore and radicalize. … By entrenching a gap between the public and private spheres, the liberal state introduces a kind of social schizophrenia, a confusion about the connection between one’s individual freedom and the collective freedom of the whole. Ostensibly free citizens are in truth atomized combatants in a condition of Hobbesian war. … Only communism, Marx claims, will provide the full reconciliation of private and public, of individual and collective freedom.”[23]
It must be remembered that while challenging patriarchy, especially in the present time of increasing fascist attacks on women, if we slip into the footsteps of Feminism, which reduces the women’s question to an identity question, it will be disastrous for the victory of the revolutionary movement aimed to overthrow the ruling classes that perpetuate patriarchy, and for the struggle for women’s emancipation. The victory of revolution will be further distanced.
Anyway, the worst is yet to come as fascism – the worst enemy of women’s emancipation – is rising to power everywhere. It must also be noted that the anti-women oppressive character of present day fascists is far more serious and dangerous than that of the previous times as they are far more inhuman, rotten and reactionary representatives of the worst ever elements of decadent and parasitic capitalism today. To convey it more simply, we can say that so far as its attitude towards women is concerned, today’s fascism is far more treacherous, shrewder, filthier and wicked in character than its counterparts of the 20th century. If it achieves final victory, it will make women’s lives a complete living hell. It is already destroying the human values in society pretty fast. The most disturbing thing about fascism is that it tries to come to power, and rule after that, by riding the trough (lowest point) of moral degradation caused by the parasitism of its own creator i.e. 21st century’s decaying capitalism. It employs the rot as its own political weapon and institutionalizes it with the help of its hold on state power. This shows what will be the ultimate fate of society if it is not freed from the clutches of capitalism, which is so decayed and parasitic that it seems like a cancerous outgrowth on the body of society, one that’s gradually eating it up. It is of course true that we are living in a society that’s become culturally and morally sick, and fascism is well poised to preside over this complete collapse of morality and societal decay in order to engulf it further under the shadow of its own kind of patriarchy.[24]
‘Death Penalty’ of History For Not Overthrowing Capitalism
Yes, we are. Let us explain it. Today’s oppressive atmosphere for women is more disgusting than what was in any previous era. In pre-capitalist societies, women were oppressed with the help of patriarchal, feudal and religious values, while this era has transformed women into a ‘free’ and saleable commodity. Women, imprisoned within four walls of the house till yesterday, are surrounded by an even more abhorrent social environment today, as they are constantly sought to be turned into a mere sex-objects or a sex-symbol/commodity assigning to them varying derogatory and dehumanizing terms. Capital has today transformed women into an object that serves its needs of anyhow seeking profit. The biggest conspiracy is that all this is being done in the name of so-called freedom and independence of women.[25] The feminist approach against patriarchy has its own share in it.
“Feminist theory, in all its diversity today, is not committed to the negation of capitalism, and some theorists do not see gender relations as a system (patriarchy), while others reject the idea of women’s emancipation or liberation as ‘grand narratives’. Even more reductionist is feminism’s delinking of gender relations and capitalism and reducing gender to questions of culture. This is a feminism that finds solace in discarding the conceptual framework of twentieth-century women’s movements, including the concepts of oppression, exploitation, subjugation, subordination, solidarity and internationalism at a time when religious and market fundamentalisms are engaged in a worldwide ‘war on women’.”[26]
If we talk about India in particular, we see an explosive mixture of feudal-patriarchal and imperialist-driven culture and values, which has nowadays become the ready-made fodder for the fascists as it has already created a deep spiritual crisis along with the sense of alienation, causing mental illnesses and tensions. This situation is of great use for the patriarchal fascist ideology. It is a fertile land for its speedy growth as its predatory nature works against both labour and women. After labour, it has targeted the woman’s body. This has added and will continue to add newer dimensions to women’s oppression and violence against them. Its effects are becoming clearly visible now. The alliance of patriarchal, religious and other pre-capitalist methods of women’s oppression with those of the dirtiest interests of modern capital has made women a unique target of capital today. The reeking anti-women atmosphere of today is the result of this only. The situation is so ghastly that it resembles the condition present just before a flood, when the water level in the dam reaches the red mark. Rapes are happening everywhere – in the streets, at the workplace, in journeys, in schools and colleges. Today, even children are not safe in their homes. No place is secure anymore. No relationship is pure. Words like morality have become meaningless today.
Let us discuss the role of the market in motivating this collapse. As said above, we are living in such a capitalist social system that feeds on decadence and parasitism, where all efforts are being made through markets to turn women into sex objects and commodities to further their profiteering, which in turn stimulates the sexual desires of men. In the general scenario of anti-women patriarchal culture, the extra overarching and increased role of capitalist market has changed the entire scenario in a fundamental manner. Let us look at it more closely.
In today’s society, everything is available in the market for sale and purchase. If we know the rules of the game of market, we know that monopoly capital controls the market from top to bottom. Its rules are under the direct control of big capital, particularly the monopolistic finance capital i.e. its most parasitic component. Its structure and its whole game by which it controls the society and moulds its image are also under the control of this monopoly capital. Here the question arises: Will the predatory market leave an ‘attractive’ thing like the female body and feeling of attraction between sexes to remain as such – a ‘thing of relationship’ and ‘a thing of aesthetics’? Will these market forces, which extract profits by extracting even the dried bones of humans, not also exploit the female body and sexuality? It does not directly create value or surplus value and capital, but it can be used in increasing the sale of goods, as we are seeing through obscene advertisements, revenue generated in the porn industry as well as the entertainment industry (movies, shows, music videos, reels etc), and hence it is a means of realising value.[27]
Pornography has become a direct means of earning money. In today’s society, which promotes a tendency to become rich by any means, female sexuality is being used as an easy and guaranteed means of earning money. It is being made a subject beyond debate of morality and immorality. How can anything to whom the market is kind, remain immoral! Even prostitution is now beyond any debate! Prostitution definitely takes place secretly, but the display of naked bodies has already got open acceptance. In the situation of destruction of productive forces and rising unemployment, naked display of the female body is being made a major attractive career for women. Having done this, all the objectives of capital are thus fulfilled. The mark of immorality still remains on prostitution, but the way it is becoming universalised, the results become obvious.
This is how the market has increased the demand for the female body and female sexuality. So, the emergence of new centres for its supply is inevitable. The market is not just a place, it is the name of a whole process. Demand and supply are just its two important characters. When the female body was included in it, it naturally found a place of pride in the present society under the shadow of patriarchy albeit remoulded according to the needs of capitalism-imperialism. So it has become an important part (secret or open) of the market with its cycle of ‘demand and supply’ working well, as the moral collapse has already reached a zenith. Here it was necessary to make it prestigious too. So ‘institutions’ to meet this end were established. Training centres for looking ‘glamorous’ were opened and its praises began to be sung. Its direct and indirect relations with the centres of big capital were established.
It is to be noted here that it is the complete moral and cultural disintegration of society where Capitalism has led us to. Fascism will first ride it and utilize it for its rise. But given its totally anti-women character and opposition to their emancipation, it will finally use this situation to push back women within the boundary walls of houses and make them accept the status of servitude.
In short, competitions of sexualisation and nudity started taking place under cultured names. The society was freed from the ‘feeling of shame’ associated with the old-fashioned ‘brothel’ and ‘harem’. The legalisation of the sex market started and it appeared natural and normal. Gradually, it has today become a part of the common market. The market went even further. It declared: when chatting is possible on the internet, then why sex can’t happen on it? This declaration of market in the 21st century has now taken a material shape in the form of pornography and the porn market.[28] And under the magical spell of interests of capital and market, society is not at all perturbed. Whether it has accepted it easily or not is not clear, but it’s obvious that it is tolerating it silently. There is no open protest anywhere. Not even in the anti-patriarchy marches that took place in Kolkata and Delhi against Abhaya’s and Nirbhaya’s rape case. The most ironic thing is that among the female population, the part which is suffering the most from increasing unemployment, poverty and hunger, is led to being ‘naturally attracted’ towards the sex market owing to the compulsions of material life and the extreme problem of livelihood, and it has taken the form of a trend!
But what a travesty of humanity is this! Society, which is sitting on the zenith of production capacity and suffering from overabundance of capital and commodities, is reeling at the same time under an apathetic situation of hunger and poverty because of capitalist production relations and the limits imposed by them! It was to be overturned so that the decay could stop from further spreading in the whole body. But that could not have happened automatically, and we certainly didn’t overturn it. So, the decay spread and deepened, to the point that it is now devouring the society. It is as if humanity is facing the ‘punishment of history’ – the punishment of ‘death penalty’ – for this i.e. for not fulfilling the urgent and much required task of overthrowing the forces that promoted all this degeneration and decay.
Now, the main objective of the market and capital with respect to the female body and sexuality seems to have been fully accomplished today, as its demand is being relentlessly increased just like the demand for other goods. This is putrefaction caused by the ultimate decay of capitalism which has resulted in complete disintegration of bourgeois society. It was to be fought with communist and socialist integration of society. But we have failed and the result is that now fascism is using and presiding over all this to let loose untold misery and attack on women under the veil of its own patriarchy. Feminist theories of all varieties have again a fair share in it.[29]
A Brief History of Women’s Subjugation & The Path to Women’s Liberation
The so-called “inferiority” of women and their subjugation to men is neither natural nor eternal. There was a time in early society, till just before the end of middle stage of barbarism and before the onset of farming and pastoralism[30] when women occupied a leading position in household affairs as well as in society, in such a manner that none was superior i.e. women and men were equal in social status. However, there are literatures that say that women commanded supremacy over men. We can find some descriptions of this in August Bebel’s book Woman and Socialism.[31] Even such descriptions only suggest this that women were ultimately men’s equal and not their superior. Their supremacy meant only this that they were responsible for maintenance of order in the primeval society. They are also described by some authors to possess as much physical power as or even more physical power than men.[32] However, the main question is this: what changed this, when and how? This was answered by Friedrich Engels through his great work, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).
He showed that the change in the mode of production changed the aforementioned relation of equality between men and women into one of dependence and slavery or inferiority. At first, under primitive agriculture, women looked after the gardens and household affairs which constituted the most important part of the then social-communal life and its production and reproduction, while men used to go hunting as a part of work to procure the daily necessities of life which played the secondary role. During this period the social life was totally communal, based on the collective ownership by the tribes or the gens over whatever was collected, achieved or produced, either individually or collectively or by any group of individuals. Everything belonged to the common ownership of the gens while the reproduction of life took place through group marriage, with descent reckoned through the female line; the child belonged to the mother’s gens and not the father’s.[33] This led women to occupy the leading position in society as well as in the homes. Private property hadn’t arrived on the scene yet.
However, with the advent of the period of livestock breeding or animal husbandry, a new mode of social life and production began to take shape with its branches spread from cattle-raising that helped expand or grow agriculture to domestic handicrafts. This finally came to replace the previous mode of social life and production, now with its basis as private property, first in flocks and herds and thereafter the other riches that it yielded, including commodities and slaves obtained in exchange of these herds falling to man’s possession or ownership. It induced a breach and led to disruption in the old gentile structure headed by mother right as the class of men became adamant that their private property be inherited by their sons. This was a fight for descent to be determined through male line and not through female line i.e. the class of men began a war to overthrow mother-right.
While this fight of men to overthrow the mother-right was going on side by side with the transition period from one mode to another, the new mode of social life, when it was fully developed, finally gave rise to the first great social division of labour that brought slavery in its train. And from this social division of labour arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes; masters and slaves. Engels writes,
“The increase of production in all branches – cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts – gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger amount of product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.”
Naturally, one can visualise a transition stage or period that existed between the previous mode in which women played the leading and dominant role and this new mode in which men played that role. In this transitional period, man started to play the leading and dominant role, first outside the home and later in the home, only after the mother-right was defeated completely. That’s why it can be said that the first ever class oppression that arose in the form of oppression of the class of slaves by the class of masters was preceded by, or at least coincided with, the oppression of the whole class of female sex by that of male.
Engels put this transition period in these words –
“As to how and when the herds passed out of the common possession of the tribe or the gens into the ownership of individual heads of families, we know nothing at present. But in the main it must have occurred during this stage. With the herds and the other new riches, a revolution came over the family. To procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he produced and owned the means of doing so. The herds were the new means of producing these necessities; the taming of the animals in the first instance and their later tending were the man’s work. To him, therefore, belonged the cattle, and to him the commodities and the slaves received in exchange for cattle. All the surplus [through the increased productivity of labour and extension of the field of production due to addition of slaves as new labour forces as Engels put above – author’s note] which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man; the woman shared in its enjoyment, but had no part in its ownership.”
Engels continues –
“The “savage” warrior and hunter had been content to take second place in the house, after the woman [in the previous mode of social life and production – author’s note]; the “gentler” shepherd [the cattle-raiser in the new mode of social life and production in which cattle herds fell to man’s possession – author’s note], in the arrogance of his wealth, pushed himself forward into the first place and the woman down into the second. And she could not complain. The division of labor within the family had regulated the division of property between the man and the woman. That division of labor had remained the same; and yet it now turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house – that her activity was confined to domestic labor – this same cause now ensured the man’s supremacy in the house: the domestic labor of the woman no longer counted beside [or was as much important as – author’s note] the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra.”
What Engels writes just after this is most important for the liberation of woman from slavery and their subjugation to man. He writes –
“We can already see from this that to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which does not merely permit of the employment of female labor over a wide range,[34] but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labor by changing it more and more into a public industry.”[35]
The rise of latter-day autocratic regimes under feudalism was the continuation of and actually the rise to supreme authority of father-right, as the natural consequence of the complete defeat and overthrow of mother-right. These words of Engels reveal the deep seated patriarchal nature of latter day autocratic rule under feudalism –
“The man now being actually supreme in the house, the last barrier to his absolute supremacy had fallen. This autocracy was confirmed and perpetuated by the overthrow of mother-right, the introduction of father-right, and the gradual transition of the pairing marriage into monogamy. But this tore a breach in the old gentile order; the single family became a power, and its rise was a menace to the gens.”[36]
Hence, the monogamous family structure based on patriarchy, in which descent is determined through male and not through female line, is neither eternal nor natural. It came into existence much later, even later than, as Engels said, “group marriage” and “pairing marriage” (in which one husband had one wife and vice versa) in which the descent was still reckoned through female line i.e. the new born child belonged to mother’s gens and not father’s. Actually, monogamy’s advent should be identified with the fall of the old descent through the female line i.e. mother-right. It came into existence in the course of development of social conditions of production and, to say more precisely, with the advent of private property that succeeded in subjugating women to men, by leading the social conditions to the world historic defeat of women and women-right by men.
As per Engels, “The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude.” Here, dispelling a confusion on two fronts is necessary. Firstly, when viewed superficially, it looks as if the contradiction is between men versus women. While in essence, it is actually women versus private property. This is starkly visible more so now than in the past in that period when newly emerged private property (at least in its first form as herds) belonged to the whole class of men. Secondly, just after that, as Engels said, “This tore a breach in the old gentile order; the single family became a power, and its rise became a menace to gens.” This menace to gens means that private property also didn’t remain the property of the gens or the whole tribe i.e. of ALL men. So the subjugation of women to men that came about by the development of private property itself in the course of development of conditions of social production, also subsequently led to the exploitation of man by man (master and slave, or as is today, capitalist and worker), and by the same logic, the time has come now when the further development of social conditions of social production (towards abolition of private property) will unitedly usher men and women from today’s capitalism-imperialism into socialism (the first stage of communism) and then in the highest stage of communism, and revert this defeat. We know, “in showing how from this “defeat of the female sex” the monogamous family developed, in which was embodied the subjugation of one sex by the other, Engels at the same time shows how in the struggle for socialism and in the building of socialism the unequal relations between women and men must in turn give place to a new equality.[37]
To sum up, the oppression of women has been a common thing to every class-divided society that rose after the rise of private property, before which oppression and slavery of women did not exist on Earth. In all the ages before the emergence of private property, women had the same respect and the same status in society as men. Women were men’s equal.[38] It was probably at the end of the barbaric era that private property emerged and with it, women became men’s property. They mainly turned into an instrument or machine for producing and raising the “heirs of private property”. In this way a patriarchal society came into existence, which still exists today even under capitalism not only in its superstructure but in its base.[39]
Conclusions
Today, we see that capitalism (especially large-scale ultramodern industries) has opened the doors of social production for women. But it has done so in contradictory form while keeping women under the clutches of patriarchy. On the ultimate liberation of women, Engels says that –
“With the patriarchal family, and still more with the single monogamous family, a change came. Household management … became a private service; the wife became the head servant, excluded from all participation in social production. Not until the coming of modern large-scale industry was the road to social production opened to her again – and then only to the proletarian wife. But it was opened in such a manner that, if she carries out her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out family duties. And the wife’s position in the factory is the position of women in all branches of business, right up to medicine and the law. The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife.”
Under socialism, all such slavery of wife or female sex will be completely wiped out. How will it be accomplished?[40]
“In the great majority of cases today, at least in the possessing classes, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy, without any need for special legal titles and privileges. Within the family he is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat. In the industrial world, the specific character of the economic oppression burdening the proletariat is visible in all its sharpness only when all special legal privileges of the capitalist class have been abolished and complete legal equality of both classes established. The democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the fight can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character of the supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”
These words automatically raise the question of social ownership of the means of production and the abolition of private property. In this way, we can see how the foundation of the practice of monogamy and the patriarchal family was laid and what is its state today. Will the future social revolution of this era aimed at the destruction of capitalism completely wipe out the current economic basis of this? Our answer is – yes, it will completely wipe it out. Let’s see how Engels answers it –
“We are now approaching a social revolution in which the economic foundations of monogamy as they have existed hitherto will disappear just as surely as those of its complement-prostitution. Monogamy arose from the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of a single individual – a man – and from the need to bequeath this wealth to the children of that man and of no other. For this purpose, the monogamy of the woman was required, not that of the man, so this monogamy of the woman did not in any way interfere with open or concealed polygamy on the part of the man. But by transforming by far the greater portion, at any rate, of permanent, heritable wealth – the means of production – into social property, the coming social revolution will reduce to a minimum all this anxiety about bequeathing and inheriting. … With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not.”
We would like to add that this will not only end patriarchy and prostitution, but will also bring about the first truly monogamous family on Earth and men will also become truly monogamous for the first time, for with the abolition of private property, there will also disappear wage-labour, the proletariat, and therefore the conditions that compel women to surrender themselves for money. Although it is impossible to tell today exactly what the nature of sexual relations will be in the classless society that will emerge after the future (imminent) destruction of capitalism, we can only say that it will be based completely on love, and nothing else other than love. Here we must listen to young Marx’s idea of love as men-women relationship and marriage. In the 1844 manuscripts, Marx writes –
“From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human … This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other human as human has become for him a need; the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.”[41]
At this point, we should not have a problem in understanding that the women’s movement naturally becomes one with the struggle being fought by the working class to create a classless society, as envisaged by Marx-Engels and Lenin. We can see how the natural direction of the women’s movement is inclined towards creating a classless society. Only in such a society, there will naturally be no place either for rape and sexual violence or any form of prostitution and subjugation, and neither for the tendency and power that serves a woman as a commodity and a mere sexual object.
So, what is needed today is a clear-cut revolutionary path to women’s liberation separate from all bourgeois paths. Unfortunately, the truth is that rapes and sexual violence are not stopping any time soon, in fact they won’t ever stop as long as the various mediums of turning women into commodities and sex objects continue to grow at this pace, and the system responsible for all this continues to exist and flourish. If we are really concerned about the increasing atrocities on women, then we will have to oppose and ultimately destroy all the structures that promote dominance over women as well as their commodification. If this requires a revolution in society, which it does, then we will have to be ready for that too. This is the situation all over the world today. Hence, we will have to return to the ‘death penalty’ of history again and again. The concerns for the future of humanity compels us to take the only path for mankind to escape this ‘death penalty’, and for that, we must put the noose around the neck of the real enemy deserving this death penalty, which is none else than capitalism-imperialism, and finally execute history’s order. There is no way except this.
We hope that the comrades participating in this Convention will agree with our conclusion. The situation today is itself declaring that this obeisance to the order of history will be justice in the form of free development of history itself and the forces that take it forward, which is in the interest of the entire humanity. Women’s liberation is inevitable, but it will have to be remembered that this liberation is possible only with the liberation of the productive forces that are imprisoned and getting destroyed in the enslaving social relations of capital. Come, let us move forward together to break all the chains of slavery including those of capital. Otherwise, we will all have to suffer a punishment in the form of destructiveness of capital that will be even more terrible than the aforementioned ‘death sentence’, and humanity will have to face days even darker than those of 9th August 2024 and 16th December 2012. Whatever the case, the dual and contrasting possibilities for our future are staring right at us, towards either the destruction of capital and all forms of exploitation or the destruction of humanity itself, and the decision to move forward is in our hands.
Let us conclude with Lenin’s words which were spoken on the 2nd anniversary of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution –
“Down with the liars who are talking of freedom and equality for all, while there is an oppressed sex, while there are oppressor classes, while there is private ownership of capital, of shares, while there are the well-fed with their surplus of bread who keep the hungry in bondage. Not freedom for all, not equality for all, but a fight against the oppressors and exploiters, the abolition of every possibility of oppression and exploitation-that is our slogan! … Freedom and equality for the oppressed sex! A fight against the oppressors, a fight against the capitalists! That is our fighting slogan, that is our proletarian truth, the truth of the struggle against capital.”[42]
Endnotes
[1] NCRB Annual Report 2022: India recorded 4,45,256 cases of crime against women (one every 51 minutes!), involving ’Cruelty by Husband’ (31.4%), ‘Kidnapping’ (19.2%), ‘Assault’ (18.7%), and ‘Rape’ (7.1% or 31,516).
While the numbers have only increased over the years, studies suggest that only 6% of rape cases in India get reported, putting the actual number at close to 5.5 lakh rapes per year, or one every minute! (BBC, 8 Feb 2017).
[2] Vaishna Roy, “Who will educate the boy child?” (Frontline, Sep 3, 2024).
[3] “Unimaginable violence along with rape and brutality with internal organs seems to be happening on the lines of those gruesome porn videos in which the most violent sex with women is shown. [In one case], the rapists have admitted to committing the atrocity on a 15-year-old girl while playing porn videos. In some such videos, children, girls and women are shown being killed while being raped. Bharat Dogra has recently cited a study in Japan to show how since the mid-eighties when pornography became easily available there, crimes of rape and sexual violence began to increase, while other types of crimes decreased. Such porn videos are becoming quite popular today. Among all sections of society and also among the youth who leave their villages, homes and families and come to cities in search of work.”
Sociologist Jan Breman writes on how the sex-market utilizes the tough life conditions of workers in order to penetrate and expand its reach with such depictions of sexual violence – “I found that a new porn cassette had arrived in the Surat market. A lot of different types of porn cassettes were already openly available. Available for just two hundred rupees, this material is in great demand. Especially among diamond cutting workers. The factories where these young Kathiawadis work are regular sweatshops, where they are made to work very hard. As soon as the work is over, the factory turns into a sultry den at night. Boys will be boys. Especially when they are living alone and their companions are also boys. All of them collect money together and watch these dirty pictures and films of women in their free time. … One of these enthusiasts drew my attention to a new video clip in early December 1992. This sadistic porn cassette had come from the West. Many copies of it were made. It depicted a young man raping a fair-skinned, brown-haired girl who dies during the brutal rape.” (Source: ‘Filhaal’ Magazine 2013).
[4] Here what we mean by morality is not an ethical ideology, whether wholly or partly, that imposes on society and demands from it adherence to some rigid and absolute (moral) values. Marxist understanding of morality is that it is a property of a person’s behaviour or men’s interpersonal relations taken in a socially-historically determined context i.e. it must be taken in relation to social-historical motion and hence understood in class terms in a class society. If man is not abstracted, how can his morality? Morality of man is certainly conditioned by historically determined social existence. It will differ in different conditions and in accordance with the class position that the person will occupy in a given class society. In this sense, any ideal, moral value or cultural standard prevailing in a society is a reflection of the actual world as existing at a particular juncture of history. If the actual world changes, so will the morality or the moral values. That’s why a particualar moral value emerges, develops and then disappears or passes from one level to another of quality. Cut off from the concrete historical conditions and processes, morality loses its meaning and existence both. Morality belongs to an age and has always in it, the class content of that age. On it has the imprint of the social bonds from where it emanates. This is the essence of morality in a class society. So it is important to correlate here that when we talk of today’s moral degradation and degeneration, we are refering to the near total decay of capitalist society. It means that we refer to death of morality as the characteristic core of the present day capitalist-imperialist world which brings in bold relief the real and objective character of the definite social relations regarding the ownership of the means of production in such a society. Hence to fight against the moral degeneration of this age means to fight to change this society as a whole and put it on different social relations.
[5] Following Nirbhaya, similar barbaric incidents of rape surfaced just after a few months. On 15th April 2013, a five-year-old girl in Delhi was brutally gangraped. Then on 26th April 2013, a six-year-old girl rape victim was found unconscious in a public toilet in Delhi with her genitals cut off. Again, on 17th April 2014, a five-year-old girl was raped and suffocated in Seoni district of Madhya Pradesh. The list goes on.
[6] Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (2002). Also, mark the word “male”.
[7] In India, we can see it grow in strength, step by step, since the ghastly communal incident of Babri Masjid demolition and the pan-India riots that followed it.
[8] In India, too, the rise of fascism to power under the tutelage of Modi and RSS-BJP combine took place in the wake of the same social conditions as were present in eastern Germany. Here, too, the capitalist development took place in agriculture through Prussian path. Hence, it’s no wonder when the atrocities on women have increased in quantity as well as quality as can be expected from a fascist government and state that has emerged on the basis of conflation of erstwhile feudal values and those of the finance capital. And so women movement in India will have to contend with a more depraved enemy as it had to do in Germany while fighting against patriarchy as such a fascist state will seek to turn patriarchy into racial-ethnic and communal patriarchy.
[9] Kevin Passmore (ibid 6).
[10] The same is true for India.
[11] Words in bracket added by author
[12] Kevin Passmore writes that they sponsored mass movements in an attempt to undermine rising waves of democracy, feminism and socialism – “German and Italian elites led their countries to war in 1914 in the hope that patriotic fervour would permit them to crush their domestic enemies.” But to think like this is a gross mistake that the erstwhile feudal and large landowning ruling classes led their countries to war. It was the desire of their monopolist bourgeoisie to grab colonies for establishing control on world market and the sources of raw materials that led them to resort to war. It is nonetheless true that the desire for empire and hateful feeling towards democracy and socialism equally exist in both of them – the erstwhile feudals turned bourgeoisie and the most developed bourgeoisie imbued with the values of the worst kind, led by the worst imperialist elements of finance capital.
Passmore writes – “[Weberians thought that] Fascism was primarily an antimodern movement, resulting from the convergence of pre-industrial elites and the petty bourgeoisie.” But it is again wrong. Fascism was actually the result of convergence of interests of pre-industrial anti-modern values of pre-industrial elites and those of the mass of petty bourgeoisie who are on the verge of complete expropriation due to expanding net of exploitation of the monopoly capital, with those of the monopoly bourgeoisie, who alone were able to turn it into a mass movement by nurturing fascist forces with the help of the money amassed by their worldwide loot and plunder of labour and natural resources.
[13] August Bebel, Introduction to ‘Woman and Socialism’ (1879).
[14]At the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1936, Hitler said, “If today a woman lawyer achieves great things and nearby there lives a mother with five, six, seven children, all of them healthy and well brought up, then I would say: from the point of view of the eternal benefit to our people, the woman who has borne and brought up children and who has therefore given our nation life in the future, has achieved more and done more!” (Jill Stephenson, ‘Women in Nazi Germany’ 2014).
[15] Victoria de Grazia writes in ‘How Fascism Ruled Women’ (1992) that “the Nazis thrust women back into the home as custodian of race, culture and sentiment, and they mobilized totalitarian organisations to penetrate deep into society and home life. The Third Reich unabashedly promoted eugenicist precepts, and its programs culminated in a frightful race war whose paramount goal … meant systematically killing off women and children too.”
[16] We refer to Jill Stephenson’s book (ibid 14) to elaborate on this. She wrote that Nazi Movement was more preoccupied with ‘race’ than anything else and believed that mankind was divided in the main into different races. They considered this division more fundamental than any other. There was a particular reason behind it. They believed in pseudo-scientific theories of racial development of mankind which had become fashionable from 1900. Accordingly, they thought that the Aryan race to which, as they believed, most ethnic Germans as well as ‘Nordic’ people like the Dutch and Scandinavians belonged, was the most superior. But at the same time, they created a fear, notably for political reasons, that this superior-most race was under threat by the inferior races, such as Slavs and particularly the Jews. So, in the name of addressing this, they began a war against the so called inferior races. But for this, they proposed, as can be understood from their activities, that they also had to wage a war inside the superior race itself to get rid of those who were not fit, politically-ideologically not reliable, not loyal, not worthy, not able for this. They categorised the Aryan race people into “valuable” and “worthless” men and women based on many considerations. For example, the “valuable” were supposed to be those who had no alleged hereditary blemishes through Aryan antecedents marrying and reproducing with people from other races. Apart from this, such pure Aryans can also be “worthless” if they were ‘asocial’ or hereditarily unhealthy, requiring life-long institutional care and medical help. ‘Asocial’ were those who were alcoholic, lesbian, gay, lazy, workshy. Single mothers or even those who might not order their home and family as Nazis prescribed were also supposed ‘asocial’ and hence “worthless”. All of them increasingly faced a bleak future in the Nazi rule that made laws and other social-political restrictions which segregated them from “valuable” citizens and denied them all state assistance and welfare measures. Most importantly they were prevented from reproducing. Not only this, those who resisted were consigned to concentration camps where they were forced to end their days miserably through starvation. Many of them faced even outright murder or death under severe torture. Apart from these, there were those who were politically unreliable, like activists of organisations associated with KPD (Communists) or SPD (Socialists), those who were hostile to Nazism, who were pacifists and doubtful, and particularly those who were feminists, whom Nazis looked down upon with contempt. Most of all such unreliable elements who were in thousands and lakhs, even if they belong to pure Aryan race, had to face arrest, torture, persecution and death.
[17] Ruchira Gupta, Feminism under Fascism (Policy Watch, Vol VIII, Issue 5, June 2019).
[18] See the fourth chapter (Quality through Quantity: Eugenics in Fascist Italy) of the book ‘Building The New Man’ (Francesco Cassata, 2011) which describes the debate in detail on how fascist state racism grew in theory as well as practice from quantity to quality through Nicola Pende’s (Italian scientist who later joined fascism) spiritualistic and biotypological interpretation of eugenics which was still opposed to “nordic, anti-conceptional selective eugenics.” However opposition was only in form, while the essence was the same.
Pende writes – “What it (his spiritualistic and biotypological interpretation of eugenics) must not be confused with is the infamous eugenics of certain eugenicists who believe that the race can be improved or purified by grafting of blood of individuals of distant or primitive races onto the trunk of decadent populations, or surgically sterilizing individuals of both sexes who have hereditarily transmittable illness.” (1939) His theory was the theory of orthogenesis which means “regular, healthy, and harmonious formation of men” by “putting human being under scientific control from the moment of conception, from the beginnings of intrauterine life … then, after this first postconception and prenatal orthogenetic work, based on the hygiene of the gestating mother, we proceed with the protection and correction of development from the first days of birth, that is, the realisation of post-natal orthogenesis.” In this, we can see the reclaiming of the idea of pure race by other means and ways.
Victoria Grazia also says that “Mussolini came under Hitler’s influence [of pure race] in the late 1930s.” (ibid 15)
[19] Shahrzad Mojab, Marxism and Feminism (2015 pg12).
[20] Lenin writes – “The thesis must clearly point out that real freedom for women is possible only through communism. The inseparable connection between the social and human position of the woman, and private property in the means of production, must be strongly brought out. That will draw a clear and ineradicable line of distinction between our policy and feminism. And it will also supply the basis for regarding the woman question as a part of the social question, of the workers’ problem, and so bind it firmly to the proletarian class struggle and the revolution. The communist women’s movement must itself be a mass movement, a part of the general mass movement. Not only of the proletariat, but of all the exploited and oppressed, all the victims of capitalism or any other mastery. In that lies its significance for the class struggles of the proletariat and for its historical creation communist society. We can rightly be proud of the fact that in the Party, in the Communist International, we have the flower of revolutionary woman kind. But that is not enough. We must win over to our side the millions of working women in the towns and villages. Win them for our struggles and in particular for the communist transformation of society. There can be no real mass movement without women.” (Clara Zetkin, “Lenin on the Women’s Question”, 1920).
[21] Further explained in notes 26 and 29.
[22] Further explained in pg 31 of this paper.
[23] Dimitrios Halikias, ‘The Young Marx on Feudalism as the Democracy of Unfreedom’ (Cambridge University Press, Nov 2023).
[24] It accords well with this fact (related to protests against RG Kar incident) that Mamata Banerjee, who is the Chief Minister of the state, herself gave open threats to the protesters, while her party workers (say mob lynchers) threatened the women protesters with ‘blackening their face’ in front of their houses. It shows the complete destruction of public morality and shame in all the ruling class parties in this era, whether it is the fascist BJP or any other party. All are competing against one another. We should remember what happened recently in BJP-ruled Manipur where a mob, poisoned with racial hatred and in the presence of the police-administration, stripped three women and paraded them naked for hours, while also sexually torturing one of them and killing her brother. This included the wife of a Kargil War soldier, while similar incidents have happened with numerous women there. The then Governor of Manipur, a woman, as well as MLAs MPs belonging to BJP raised alarm and made repeated requests to the Centre for intervention, but Modi didn’t budge and allowed things to happen freely. There is no report that he even once called and reprimanded the CM for this. Even today, when we are penning these words, the demonic rule of the BJP government continues there. There is no respite in rape and violence.
Similar examples can be found aplenty in BJP-ruled states where, unlike in Nirbhaya that happened in Delhi in UPA rule and Abhaya case in TMC-ruled Bengal, even the protests were not allowed. BJP agitated and made much clamour in the RG Kar case, but we know BJP governments don’t even allow agitation when such incidents take place in their own-ruled states. We must keep in mind the several incidents where BJP workers themselves have been perpetrators or have openly supported or backed them – Unnao (2017), Kathua (2018), Hathras (2020), Women Wrestlers’ Protest (2023), BHU (2023) …
[25] Women are being brought to the market as a ‘commodity’ today ‘freely’ and ‘with their freedom (consent)’, just as a huge population of the society is being uprooted every day and brought to the labour market ‘with their freedom’. The lords of money are committing a fraud with women’s ‘freedom’ just as they do with the ‘freedom’ of a labourer.
[26] Shahrzad Mojab, Marxism and Feminism.
[27] The measures and arrangements made by this society to satisfy the increased sexual desire of men of all ages (marriage and prostitution) are falling short. The result is before us. Uncontrolled sexual desire is making even the children in the family and relatives its victims. Apart from this, the mechanisms adopted by the market in this connection were bound to have a tremendous impact on the sex psychology of adolescents, too. When a teenager sees the highly sexualized and sensual female body shown in any modern medium, then naturally the desire for similar sensual gestures is awakened in her too. This first instinct and condition of her to accept herself as just a body instead of a human being seems to be completely ‘voluntary’, but its entire background is already present, which forcibly gives birth to this instinct. Although, like the ‘invisible hand of the market’, externally this background also remains invisible. On the other hand, for example, the way a teenager sees a woman in a porn film on the Internet, the first image of a woman in his mind is that of a sex object. The first relationship that a teenager forms with a woman is that with a mother and sister, but this relation naturally has limitations in catering to the growing natural interests of teenagers. The natural and innate demands of growing age (love and affection etc.) get lost somewhere in the abundance of aforementioned measures and means that increase the demand for the female body in society. Apart from his mother and sister, the form of women that he mostly sees around him through these mediums creates a very one-sided image of women in his mind. The thought of a woman as a companion becomes an exception in this environment. The modern image of a woman as a sex object and the overexploitation of the unbridled sexual desire of the ‘patriarchal’ man by the market are creating ill-effects of many dimensions. On the one hand, there has been an increase in rapes and child sexual abuse, while on the other, there has also been an increase in gruesome and brutal sexual violence, which has agitated the entire society, especially the women community the most today. The question is: what is the source of the rise in such unspeakable barbarity? As can be seen we have discussed this in our paper.
[28] A study published in the ‘Indian Journal of Public Health’ in 2014 points out that India, with 12% of the websites devoted to pornography, ranks third in porn consumption globally.
[29] Even Shahrjad Mojab, who is a defender of feminism and in favour of a ‘marriage’ (a joint collaboration) between Marxism and Feminism, says that “While feminism has indeed made enormous contributions to our understanding of gender relations since the theoretical twists and turns of the 1980s, its delinking of capitalism and patriarchy is a political undertaking that … ensures the anchoring of feminism in liberalism and – at best – democratic theory and their links to the market.” This is natural because if feminist theory is against overthrowing the capitalist order and patriarchy, it has to be in collusion with it and carry forward its mission through whatever means possible, including market. For feminist theory, the issue of ultimate women’s emancipation is a farce. It sees women issue only as an issue of gender identity and culture. Hence, it has to maintain a cozy relationship with the market and advance its objectives even if it goes against women. And this is happening at a time when religious and market fundamentalisms are engaged in a worldwide ‘war on women’ as Shahrjad Mojab rightly claims.
[30]For complete light on this early society, we would like to refer to August Bebel’s Women and Socialism in addition to F. Engels’ The Origin of Family, Private Property, & the State’.
[31] “In the gens women sometimes ruled with severity, and woe to the man who was too lazy or too clumsy to contribute his share to the common sustenance. He was cast out and was obliged either to return to his own gens, where he was not likely to be received kindly, or to gain admission into another gens where he was judged less harshly. That this form of matrimony has been maintained by the natives of Central Africa to this very day was experienced by Livingstone, to his great surprise, as related by him in his book, “Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa.” At the Zambesi he encountered the Balonda, a strong and handsome Negro tribe, engaged in agricultural pursuits, and was soon able to confirm the reports made to him by Portuguese, which he had at first declined to believe, that the women held a superior position among them. They are members of the tribal council. When a young man marries, he must migrate from his village into the one in which his wife resides. He must at the same time pledge himself to provide his mother-in-law with kindling wood for lifetime. The woman, in turn, must provide her husband’s food. Although minor quarrels between man and wife occasionally occurred, Livingstone found that the men did not rebel against female supremacy. But he found, on the other hand, that when men had insulted their wives, they were severely punished—by their stomachs. The man—so Livingstone relates—comes home to eat, but is sent from one woman to another and is not given anything. Tired and hungry, he finally climbs upon a tree in the most populous part of the village and exclaims, with a woe-begone voice: “Hark, hark! I thought I had married women, but they are witches! I am a bachelor; I have not a single wife! Is that just and fair to a lord like myself?!” (Bebel)
[32] Bebel writes that normally “under maternal law, comparatively peaceful conditions prevailed. Social relations were simple and the mode of life was a primitive one. The various tribes kept aloof from one another and respected each other’s domain. If one tribe was attacked by another the men took up arms for defense and were ably supported by the women…. Taken all in all, the physical and mental differences between man and woman were not nearly as great in primeval days as they are at present… Columbus was attacked near Santa Cruz by a troop of Indians in a small sloop in which the women fought as bravely as the men. This conception is furthermore confirmed by Havelock Ellis: “Among the Andombies on the Congo, according to Mr. H. H. Johnstone, the women, though working very hard as carriers and as laborers in general, lead an entirely happy existence; they are often stronger than the men and more finely developed, some of them, he tells us, having really splendid figures… they carry loads as heavy as those of the men and do it quite as well. In North America again an Indian chief said to Hearne: Women were made for labor; one of them can carry or haul as much as two men can do. Schellong, who has carefully studied the Papuans in the German protectorate of New Guinea from the anthropological point of view, considers that the women are more strongly built than the men. In Central Australia again, the men occasionally beat the women through jealousy, but on such occasions it is by no means rare for the woman, single-handed, to beat the man severely. At Cuba, the women fought beside the men and enjoyed great independence. Among some races of India, the Pueblos of North America, the Patagonians, the women are as large as the men. So, among the Afghans, with whom the women in certain tribes enjoy a considerable amount of power. Even among the Arabs and Druses it has been noted that the women are nearly as large as the men. And among Russians the sexes are more alike than among the English or French.”
[33] This was called mother-right. The primitive form of social organisation was gens (plural ‘gentes’) and each tribe was composed of gentes. People descended from the same mother belonged to the same gens. Each tribe was composed of a number of gentes in which descent was determined through female and not male line.
[34] The basis of which is the technological revolution that is taking place continuously under capitalism (albeit now with hiccups, grave interruptions, even to the point of retrogression, owing to capitalism’s own unending crisis) and which will take place unhindered and even more vigorously under socialism.
[35] Of course modern day capitalism has done so but only up to the limit permissible under the present capitalist social relations, that allows only a tiny section to benefit from this industry. It can be done for the whole population of women only by and under socialism which will establish factory kitchens on the widest possible scale to benefit all, and break the barriers imposed by capitalist social relations.
[36] The sentence “But this tore a breach in the old gentile order; the single family became a power, and its rise was a menace to the gens” is quite important in order to understand how private property based father-right and monogamy led to rise of autocratic kings along with the age of monarchy based on single family power, that completely negated collective ownership and even its sense that was embodied in the gentile structure of the primitive social organisation of the tribes.
[37] see the introduction of Women and Communism
[38] This should also be kept in mind so that no new misunderstanding arises here. It is not that women did not do household work during the period of matriarchy or when the mother-right existed. The difference lies in its social and private character. In those days, the household work of managing homes and simple agriculture (gardening) done by women in the old communal family (consisting of several couples and their children) was as important, public and socially necessary as the work done by men to gather food. With the establishment of the patriarchal family, and particularly after the establishment of the monogamous individual family (modern individual family), the social character of household work disappeared as fast as it could. Now it is no longer a matter of concern for society. It has become a private work and a drudgery for wives since women were excluded from the sphere of social production and became the slaves in the house.
[39] Let us explain how patriarchy works and finds its vitality in the capitalist mode of production. According to the materialist conception of history, ‘the decisive element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction of immediate life. But this itself is of two types. On the one hand, there is the production of the means of subsistence – food, clothing and shelter – and the tools required for these things, and on the other hand, there is the production of human beings themselves, that is, the propagation of species.’ – said Marx. Under capitalism with regard to working class and the proletariat, it takes the form of the production and reproduction of labour-power. Thus the entire commodity production is ultimately dependent on the family for the commodity on which the whole of capitalist society depends i.e. labour power. The value of labour power is determined by the amount of social labour required to produce and reproduce labour power in its entirety. In short, the labour of the entire family as a unit (including all the household labour involved in the reproduction of the existing labour power as well as the production of new labour power, i.e. the new proletarians, which the workmen need to rest, recover their strength and strengthen themselves for their labour tomorrow) determines the value of the labour power of a worker. The institutionalized dominance of men, i.e. patriarchy, which has its roots in the social structure of the nuclear family as an economic unit under present-day capitalism, creates a paradoxical situation and veils the true nature of wages and the real determinants of the value of labour power in such a way that women’s domestic (necessarily social) labour appears to be a private service performed for their husbands, not the production and reproduction of labour power. This is a great service to capital, because it not only ensures cheap labour of women for the capitalists (since the real value of wives’ labour power, which if calculated will be much more than what is generally and customarily incorporated in the wages her husband, need not be paid), but it also protects capital from the anger and resentment of wives. It turns the anger and resentment of wives against the husbands. In this way both husbands and wives are befooled by capital in the interest of capital. It makes husbands unwittingly accomplices of capital in suppressing and exploiting their wives. Obviously, there have been contradictory tendencies within capitalism regarding the genderization of domestic labour from the very beginning, which have become even more contradictory and oppressive in today’s times. On the one hand, capitalism draws everyone – men, women and even children – into the production process, while on the other hand, it wants to keep the reproductive labour described above as women’s private work as before. This helps the capitalist class immensely in keeping the price of such labour at a minimum level or in keeping a large part of it unpaid. In this way we see that this plunder of domestic unpaid labour is the real reason, which is a main motivation for maintaining patriarchy in capitalism.
[40] A. Bebel writes, “As soon as the society becomes the owner of all means of production, the duty to work of all able-bodied persons, regardless of sex, becomes a fundamental law of socialised society” with erstwhile private responsibility of bearing and rearing the child being transformed into social responsibility and thus private family labour (in cleaning, stitching, preparing food in kitchens, etc.) becoming the social labour. This is what is meant by breaking up of the modern individual family. Bebel further writes, “Society cannot exist without labour. It therefore is justified in demanding that all who seek to satisfy their requirements, should also serve to the best of their physical and mental ability.” This will bring economic independence of women, the basis upon which they will break their bondage of slavery under men. This will also create the basis of true love and the society will see for the first time a true monogamous relationship.
[41] Karl Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
[42] Lenin, Soviet Power and the Status of Women (1919).
Sarwahara 
2 thoughts on “Rising Atrocities on Women in Times of Fascism & The Question of Women’s Emancipation”