Women & Marxism

On Monday, June 20, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a massive class action sexual discrimination lawsuit filed against Wal-Mart by a group of current and former women employees. This blow against the rights of these 1.5 million workers should come as no surprise. Even a cursory review of legal history shows that the courts have a long tradition of siding with big business over workers. And no wonder: most of the supposedly “impartial” judges are very political indeed, most of them having been appointed by one of the two corporate parties!

On the anniversary of Women's Day we would like to highlight Marxist.com's section on Women & Marxism, readers of Socialist Appeal will find a variety of articles dealing with the question of discrimination against women and the struggle for women's emancipation.

“I really believe the revolution has changed us. People are acting differently towards each other.” These are the words of Ms Kamel, 50, one of the many women who were out on Tahrir Square, actively participating in the revolution.

Mainstream feminism has attempted to reduce March 8th to a vague and depoliticised celebration of the female sex as a homogenous group, but to socialists and working class women the world over, it is a day for mobilizing, a day of class struggle. It was in fact first launched by Clara Zetkin at the second International Conference of Women Socialists, held in Copenhagen in 1910, with the aim of mobilizing women for the struggle against bourgeois domination.  See also our section on Marxism and Women.

"The working woman and the peasant woman are oppressed by capital, but over and above that, even in the most democratic of the bourgeois republics, they remain, firstly, deprived of some rights because the law does not give them equality with men; and secondly - and this is the main thing - they remain in "household bondage", they continue to be “household slaves", for they are overburdened with the drudgery of the most squalid, backbreaking and stultifying toil in the kitchen and the family household." V.I.Lenin, March 4, 1921

On March 8, International Working Women’s Day, we published the first part of this article. The second part deals with the negative effects of the Stalinist degeneration of the soviet state and how this led to the undoing of all the work the Bolsheviks had started in their attempts to achieve a genuine emancipation of women.

To celebrate International Working Women's Day we are publishing an article on women and the Russian Revolution. It shows how that single event did more for women than any other struggle that had come before it and indeed after as well. First published (July 18, 2002) in issue Number 5 of 'In difesa del marxismo', the theoretical magazine of the Italian Marxist journal FalceMartello.

Tomorrow, March 8, is International Working Women’s Day, and to mark this important event we are publishing this article. It was first printed in issue Number 5 of ‘In difesa del marxismo’, the theoretical magazine of the Italian Marxist journal FalceMartello. Although originally written for an Italian audience we believe it is of interest to labour movement activists and youth around the world.