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Feb. 18, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
31:48
Marxism, Feminism and Housework
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The woman free from the man, both free from capital.
Those words were uttered by the Italian communist Camilla Rivera in 1921.
That's a brilliant start because already you've told me that you need to be alone and penniless for this bullshit to look appealing.
And I think that sums up very well the Marxist position on the women's question, which is as long as we have capitalism, no oppression can be abolished within it.
Probably true.
I mean, to the sort of person who thinks that the word oppression is interchangeable with inconvenience.
But what does this really mean?
For most feminists, this position has been interpreted as since Marxists believe that women's oppression has a material basis within capitalism, cannot be abolished within it, there's really no use fighting against it because a socialist revolution will erupt automatically and solve it automatically and the day after the revolution women's oppression will disappear.
I'm starting to see why people think Marxists are lazy.
And if we struggle for any reforms, it's purely economical ones.
Marxists are more or less blind to the cultural aspects of women's oppression.
Is that a fact?
Traditional economic Marxists are blind to women's oppression.
If only there was a form of Marxism that would take into account the cultural aspects of women's oppression, but there's no such thing as cultural Marxism, is there?
Or think it's non-important at all.
Now, this view, on the one hand, is a view that many leftists have of Marxists, on all positions, really.
When Marxists say that we need a socialist revolution to solve anything...
I'm pretty sure that socialist revolution is the only suggestion Marxists have ever had.
And I don't want to be cynical about it, but it kind of sounds like they want other people to do the work for them.
They will think, aha, we don't need to struggle for any reforms.
See?
You just want to wait for a socialist revolution, which will solve everything automatically.
I just don't know how this didn't catch on.
If only there was one ideology that we could adopt, there would be a panacea for everything.
I mean, it's not that it sounds too good to be true or anything.
And in this, a socialist revolution is more or less portrayed as a train ride where you get on, you might have a little nap, you wake up, you get off at socialism, and you find paradise.
I don't even know if we're talking about feminists, Marxists, or radical Islamists at this point, but I do know that anyone looking for a paradise is a fucking fool.
A revolution is not really like that.
Thank God someone was brave enough to say it.
But if that were true, then political activity, organizing, party building would be completely unnecessary.
If you want to smash the white patriarchal capitalist system, you've got to do it yourself.
This meeting, this discussion, this whole organization would be completely unnecessary.
Don't say that.
I'm sure your organization is completely necessary.
But it's not really the case.
But this view is also the effect of the betrayals of the labour movement and in particular the distortion of Marxism by Stalinism.
Don't tell me.
Everyone else who tried Marxism had failed because they were doing it wrong.
But this time we're going to do it correctly.
Which I will come back to later.
Now is it possible for Marxists to ignore the women's question?
How about is it possible for women to be part of a movement without needing special treatment within that movement?
To ignore women's struggle?
Is it possible for the working class to take power?
The question is not can the working class grasp power?
It's what do they do with it once they have it.
And the answer to that question is they give it away to dictators.
Without also struggling against women's oppression.
It is not.
And that is partly because women's oppression is a fundamental part of capitalism, which means you cannot struggle against capitalism and abolish it without also struggling against women's oppression.
Right, so you think that women's oppression, whatever that means, is exclusively the consequence of the capitalist system.
But it is also because a majority of the world's poor, a big part of the working class, are women.
Half of the working class are women, you idiot.
And they end up marrying working class men.
Or at least they did until men decided, you know what, fuck marriage.
And the working class cannot take power without women.
Really?
Will there be women manning the barricades?
Sorry, womaning the barricades.
And women will not struggle without also struggling against their specific oppression.
I'm starting to think that these struggles are mostly metaphorical and that these oppressions are mostly inconveniences.
Now, women's oppression is something that affects all aspects of women's lives.
It is just so hard to believe white Western women when they tell everyone just how oppressed they are to a room full of people at a university.
I'm sorry, it just really is.
Violence causes more death and disability worldwide amongst women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, war, malaria and traffic accidents.
You're looking at this from the wrong way.
What you are saying is that we are more peaceful, we are more disease-free and we have safer roads than ever before.
At least one in three women have been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in their lifetime.
One of those things isn't like the others and probably accounts for the vast majority of these statistics.
Not that any citations are going to be given, but you know, what do you expect?
With the abuser someone usually known to her.
99% of maternal deaths occur in developing countries.
Well, I'll try and contain my surprise that the most maternity deaths occur where there's the least sanitation.
But how exactly is that oppressive to women?
Men didn't invent birth.
Pregnancy is not some kind of capitalist conspiracy.
And in a minute, you are going to advocate for us to return to the primordial state from which we arose, aren't you?
And women continue to die of pregnancy-related causes with a rate of one every minute.
There are three and a half billion women on the planet.
That is a fucking low number.
But how exactly is this oppressive to women?
This is a consequence of nature.
The fact you might die is not an oppression that has been invented.
And in Sweden, women make around 85% of men's income.
Make.
Make.
This is what they earn.
They're not paid less because they're women.
They work less in aggregate and in lower paying jobs.
This is in fact not an oppression, but the consequence of a free society.
And this is supposed to be the most equal country in the world.
One of them.
Oh, yeah, what was I thinking?
It must be the Swedish patriarchy.
And they spend around 30 hours a week on household work.
Sorry, you think that women are doing over four hours a day of cleaning?
I don't know where you fucking live, but the houses there must be spotless.
Where I live, Jeremy Kyle rakes in millions of women watching a day.
Where men spend 20 hours every week.
Oh, the oppression.
Women are choosing to do more housework than men.
And in the ages 20 to 64, around 40% of women have full-time employment.
And for men in the same category, it's 80%.
Well, holy shit, I think we've just explained the wage gap.
One woman is beaten to death every week by someone known to her.
Yeah, but is that with the regulation government-issued trancheon?
Or is it with an instrument they've procured themselves possibly from online?
Because they can be less efficient.
And 700 women get raped every week.
And out of those, only three lead to conviction.
Where?
What are you talking about?
You seem to have just some abstract concept of women and these are stats that you are applying to all women everywhere all the time.
And in Pakistan, you need to have four male witnesses when you get raped.
Not just that can claim that the rape has taken place, but who saw the actual penetration.
Are you giving this speech on Marxism and feminism at a Pakistani university, are you?
I find that unlikely.
Now, all of the aspects of women's oppression create enormous sense of frustration amongst women.
Yeah, you're not really selling me on the concept of oppression.
You're making it sound like the concept of inconvenience.
Leading to suicide.
Oh yeah, I mean, women's suicide rates are just skyrocketing.
It's amazing that there are any left.
Eating disorders, depression, all kinds of things.
Sure, why not?
Why not?
Let's go with that.
Let's go with that.
But also, it leads to such frustration and anger, which will turn sooner or later into struggle.
In other news, feminists have redefined the word struggle.
It now means to nag.
And this means that working class women, young women, lower parts of the middle class women.
Women remarkably like you.
They are an enormous source of revolutionary potential, which has been shown time and time again.
Where?
In revolutions, when women have played a leading role, often the first ones to move.
When?
And almost always the last ones to give up.
Oh yeah, women are just like the Spartans, aren't they?
Not because women are better, or anything like that, but...
No, of course not because women are better.
Try not to smile.
Unlike this guy here, he's not doing a lot of smiling, is he?
Because women are better.
This isn't some kind of supremacist movement.
Because women are extremely oppressed in capitalism.
That's a really funny coincidence, actually.
It's funny you say that, because the only people who are actually oppressed by capitalism are the people who either can't work, you know, the sort of the people who have lost a leg or are morbidly obese or something like that, the people who don't want to work because they're fucking lazy, and the people who don't really have any other particular skills because they did gender studies degrees.
Believe it or not, everyone else actually does pretty well out of capitalism.
You know, sort of like a house, a car, holidays, food on the table, entertainment, luxuries, that sort of thing.
And have more to lose if a revolution fails, and more to win if it succeeds.
I don't see how they've got more to lose, but they do certainly have more to win.
Marxists do not disagree with feminists that there exists cultural aspects of women's oppression.
But we simply explain and understand how and why it does exist and how to abolish it.
And it turns out the only way to do that is through revolution that puts women in a position of power over men.
Funny result, isn't it?
It could have been something else, but it just wasn't.
It's not like we wanted to gain all this power through overthrowing the current legitimate power structures that anyone could work up within.
We're just like one that really innately favours us.
If you don't mind.
Feminists, and in particular I would say radical feminists.
They are the majority these days.
They have contributed with a lot of good research.
I have read radical feminist research.
It is not good research.
On how women's oppression works, how it functions in society, and have researched a lot of good statistics, which is obviously good, which we can use as Marxists.
Oh, obviously.
And it's good for anyone who wants to fight women's oppression.
And many of them have sacrificed a lot in the struggle against women's oppression.
Yeah, they really have.
They've sacrificed loads.
I mean, none of them have died or been dispossessed of their property or lost tenure at the universities in which they teach.
But they have sacrificed a lot.
Risked their lives in that struggle.
And most feminists are very, very angry young women.
Probably because no one will marry them.
Who are very frustrated about their situation in society.
But feminism, whether it is queer feminism, radical feminism, intersectionality, what is called Marxist feminism.
Just so you know, there we have it.
Intersectional feminism is Marxist feminism.
That's not my assertion, that is her assertion.
An intersectional Marxist feminist cannot explain why women's oppression exists and how it came to be and how to abolish it.
Then what fucking use is it?
What have they been doing for the last 70 years if they are still unable to tell us where this oppression is coming from, what's perpetuating it, or what can be done about it?
And because some people would say, well, okay, you need Marxism to explain some parts of it, but Marxism has some weaknesses.
And this has been developed by intersectionality and other ideas in feminism.
And also, therefore, you need to use these tools.
But that is false because all these streams within feminism contradict the basic ideas, the fundamental ideas of Marxism.
All of those does.
Queer feminism, radical feminism contains basic ideas which contradict Marxism and therefore it cannot be a development of Marxism.
I have absolutely no idea whether that's true, but why the fuck wouldn't it be?
Everything else about feminism appears to be inherently contradictory and self-defeating.
Now, Engels explained in The Origins of the Family, Private Property in the States, that women's oppression has not always existed.
Oh, this is going to be good.
Majority of human life, we lived in what Marxists refer to as primitive communism, without a state, without women's oppression, without class oppression, class society.
Hang on, hang on, let's not stop there.
Let's not stop there.
Let's list a few other things that we were also going without.
Let me see.
Houses, sanitation, regular food, transport, literacy, low infant mortality rates, and basic safety.
But I know, I can't believe that cave women gave up all of their liberty, all of their freedom from oppression, just to be the beneficiary of all of these things.
We existed and lived in equality.
Well, I will take inequality over living like a fucking caveman any day.
Where the lineage was passed down through the mother.
You don't know that, and you certainly don't know that that was the situation for every tribe on earth.
Group marriages were the dominant form of marriage.
You don't know that?
And women and men contributed equally to the survival of the clans.
You have absolutely no idea, do you?
I mean, what does contributed equally to the survival of the clans even mean?
Well, what happened was when herding emerged and cultivation of the land began, a surplus started to arise.
Oh yeah, yeah, gone.
And some people were better at farming.
Some people were better at herding.
Oh yeah, but everyone was equally as good hunting or gathering in our communist caveman paradise.
Some people happen to have better land and differences began to emerge.
Oh yeah, because your average Eskimo eats tons of bananas.
Because if you're a hunter-gatherer, everything's exactly the same everywhere.
Private property started to emerge.
And with these differences, women's oppression also started to emerge.
Okay, we haven't actually defined women's oppression, but what I'm guessing is that you're suggesting there are some women who don't work very hard.
So while they're sat around with nothing, there are other women sat around with something.
And so the women who have nothing are going, well, good God, I'm being fucking oppressed.
I am absolutely being oppressed by the fact that Sheila over there has got more rings than I do.
Look at Jane over there.
She's got much nicer hair than I do.
I'm being so totally oppressed.
Because these were things that were in the hands of men.
No, that's really stupid and you're really stupid for saying it.
Believe it or not, most people got married in the past.
So there was no men.
There was the family unit, which I realise you're having trouble grasping given that you started this with the desire to abolish the family unit.
And therefore, from going from societies, living societies, where men and women were contributing equally.
Only a complete fucking moron would equate the primeval struggle of mankind against the elements and the great wild earth to class oppression.
The clans started breaking up.
Oh yeah, that doesn't sound like Talbox gone.
Classes started to appear.
And with that, women who were no longer contributing equally were more or less enslaved to men.
Oh yeah, that's absolutely a watertight theory.
Women don't do as much work as men, therefore they're enslaved to men to not do any work.
I don't really think you understand the concept of oppression.
Because what you have described there is women's privilege.
And because men wanted...
I don't mean to interrupt, but I'm rather looking forward to a modern feminist telling me about the motivations of paleolithic men.
To have their children inherit their private property.
The lineage was shifted to men.
And in order to make sure that his children were really his children, monogamy started to appear.
Oh yeah, that wild generalization sounds absolutely rock solid.
I'm sure that's exactly as you describe it.
As a way of making sure that the children were really the children of the man.
So why are women so eager to get married instead of men?
I mean, what do you reckon it is?
Internalized misogyny, something like that?
And of course, the monogamous family has more or less always meant monogamy for women, but not for men.
Oh, yeah, yeah, poor women.
Just totally the victims of their own monogamy.
And so the majority since that time, women have been more or less isolated in their homes and tied to their men.
You have no fucking idea about anything, do you?
What you are describing is the best of human civilization.
You are describing roughly 1950s or 1960s America after World War II, after America was the only country left standing after World War II, almost unscathed.
This is the middle class dream that you are describing.
Women who don't have to work and men who can earn enough to sustain an entire family and household on one wage.
For most of human history, for most human beings, this has not been the case.
But I like the way that you fucking gloss over that.
As if it didn't fucking happen.
More or less an appendage of their men.
You have a really low opinion of women in the past.
Now, with capitalism.
Oh yeah.
Capitalism freed a large part of women.
Although capitalism is exclusively responsible for women's oppression, it freed a large part of women, did it?
Pushed peasant women, but also upper class women, into production.
Oh yeah, because up until then, peasant women were sat in their hovels doing nothing.
Honestly, this is just such bollocks.
And because of that, women can, to a bigger extent during capitalism, because they are freed more so from the household work, they can achieve a bigger part of relative freedom in comparison to during feudalism or slave society.
What are you talking about?
You've already told us that only 40% of women are in full-time work.
So that is far less than under feudalism or your slave society, whatever that is, when almost all women would have done some sort of work.
Even aristocratic women did work.
What are you waffling about?
But because capitalism still needs the bourgeois family unit, it needs a family unit in which household work is done in order to reproduce the working class, in order to make sure that new babies are born, taken care of, so that new workers arise, that they can exploit and oppress viciously.
Are you aware that you are looking this completely ass backwards?
Capitalism is a system.
It's not an individual.
It doesn't have goals or desires.
The desire to have a family is a human desire.
Each individual would like to be part of a family, or at least normally.
The systems that we are living in now are all fundamentally designed to facilitate that.
Yes, there are good systems and there are bad systems, but that's what those systems are for.
I don't even know what kind of cynical person looks at the nuclear family and says, my God, this is just a machine to produce workers for the evil bourgeois capitalist system.
Look at these women sitting comfortably in their homes, producing children and watching daytime television.
They should be out working, presumably in the fields, comrade.
Because of that, they still need women's unpaid labour in the household.
Probably the most entitled statement a sentient being will ever make.
I get to sit around in my house and do nothing but keep it tidy all day.
This is unpaid labour, and goddammit, that's unfair.
And are dependent on that, on the survival of capitalism.
And therefore, women are never drawn into production as men are, to the same extent as men are.
Right, so what you're saying is that you want people drawn into production when they don't need or necessarily want to be drawn into production.
Choosing not to work is a choice for women.
It's, you know, like you say, 40% are in full-time employment, which means the majority of women are not in full-time employment.
And they could be because 40% are.
So a large number of women are in full-time employment, but most women choose not to be in full-time employment.
Why do you want to force them to be in full-time employment if they don't either want to or need to be?
But women will also, or the women's main role will always be precisely the reproduction of the working class and the unpaid labor in their household.
What about middle and upper class women?
They're not reproducing the working class.
But either way, what you're saying is you think that women shouldn't be required to do housework.
They should instead be required to get jobs.
I know you're going to find this difficult to believe, but a lot of women don't want to have full-time jobs.
Understandably, the path of least resistance is the one that most people take, which is why only 40% of women are in full-time employment and 60% aren't.
And therefore can never be freed from their men altogether during capitalism.
Right, so there we are then.
That's the thing.
They want to be freed from their men, but they can't be under capitalism because stuff costs money and some women aren't rich.
Now, of course, for a period, this household work has been partly socialized by the creation of welfare state.
Household work has been socialized, has it?
Someone from the community is hoovering my stairs, are they?
In the post-war period.
But this was a very special period in which the world market expanded enormously.
And because of this, the capitalists could make huge profits by investing and reinvesting in production, expanding production.
And because of that, they constantly needed new labor.
And women were drawn into production.
That's what you want, you fucking moron.
You are advocating for women being in production.
You're complaining that men were keeping women out of production or the capitalist system was keeping women out of production.
More and more.
And because of that, there was a need for capitalism for a welfare state, for a certain degree of socialization of the household work.
Again, there has been no socialization of any household work.
That's not what a welfare state is.
But since the 70s, since the crisis in the 70s, and especially since the crisis which began in 2008 today, capitalism no longer develops like this.
It no longer creates huge profits mainly by expanding production.
Rather, the other way around.
It achieves it through squeezing the working class harder.
And so it doesn't need more and more labour.
Rather, more and more people are pushed out of production.
Just like this girl doesn't know anything about history.
She doesn't know anything about economics either.
And with this, the burden on women increases and the role of the bourgeois family unit also increases.
And not the other way around.
In this crisis, they will attempt to smash the welfare state in country after country.
The only way to do away with the slavery of women, the only way to do away with the bourgeois family unit, is to socialize the household work.
But the only way to do this is to get rid of capitalism, to nationalize the economy, the main levers of the economy, the big banks, the big industries, and place them in the hands of the working class who can democratically run it.
Well, that's just wonderful.
I'm sure that that system won't end up collapsing in on itself like the Soviet Union.
Seriously though, what absolute crap she's talking.
Oh, the housework is unpaid labor.
And so in exchange for sitting around at home while someone else pays my rent, I want my bills to be socialized.
So for some reason, we can then nationalize the whole fucking economy.
Just so some lazy ass women who think they're doing too much housework get to do less housework or something or get paid to do housework.
I don't even really know what the thrust of it is.
But to be fair, we're only halfway through a lecture.
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