Women were the first oppressed social group in human society, and planet-wide woman remains the “slave of a slave” and faces the greatest societal violence, murder, repression, insults and humiliations in every country. A determined, immediate and continuous struggle against material privilege, war and violence is not only morally correct but a precondition for the emancipation of humanity. This struggle begins with the fight to emancipate women as proletariat, and as women.
The dialectic of emancipation is such that an oppressed and exploited class, and/or oppressed group, such as women, can be emancipated only when their labor is replaced by a more efficient form of energy. The historic location of the female in the social division of labor was the reason for thousands of generations of women to be born into servitude, as baby makers and caretakers of the home.
Women’s final emancipation will entail destruction of the social division of labor that trapped the female in the home as servant to the family. Economic communism is needed for full emancipation.
Engels wrote of women’s future emancipation:
“What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love, or to refuse to give themselves to[…]”
(F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884.)https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/
With increased use of machines, computers and robots, the need for workers to have upper body strength, indeed, strength at all, has been removed from almost all workplaces. While technological changes have laid the basis for women’s emancipation, the struggle of men and women together is necessary to overthrow capital and institute a fair system.
(See, Women question.)”
Excerpt From: Darryl Mitchell. “Marxist Glossary Mini Edition 3.0.” iBooks.
Marxist Glossary Mini Edition 3.0 can be purchased at Lulu.com
