No Woman, No
Revolution, Part 2
No
Woman Question?
The proletarian revolution is inconceivable without the involvement
of the more than 50% of the population which is female. Bourgeois feminism
cannot lead women towards proletarian revolution. Resolution of the
contradictions that oppress women cannot be achieved under capitalism. These are
the general and compelling circumstance that motivates this course, No Woman,
No Revolution.
Alexandra Kollontai understood
the limits of bourgeois feminism very well. In 1908 she wrote:
“The [bourgeois] feminists seek equality in the framework of the existing
class society, in no way do they attack the basis of this society.” (The full document is attached and the download is linked
below).
“Where, then, is that general ‘woman question’? Where is that unity of
tasks and aspirations about which the feminists have so much to say? A sober
glance at reality shows that such unity does not and cannot exist,” wrote Kollontai.
“The feminists declare
themselves to be on the side of social reform, and some of them even say they
are in favour of socialism — in the far distant future, of course — but they
are not intending to struggle in the ranks of the working class for the
realisation of these aims. The best of them believe, with a naive sincerity,
that once the deputies’ seats are within their reach they will be able to cure
the social sores which have in their view developed because men, with their
inherent egoism, have been masters of the situation. However good the
intentions of individual groups of feminists towards the proletariat, whenever
the question of class struggle has been posed they have left the battlefield in
a fright. They find that they do not wish to interfere in alien causes, and
prefer to retire to their bourgeois liberalism which is so comfortably
familiar,” says Kollontai.
Kollontai was writing at the height of
modern feminism’s first blooming, at the time of the “Suffragette” campaigns for votes for
women in capitalist countries, which votes hardly existed at
the time. Kollontai
published her pamphlet “The Social Basis
of the Woman Question” (attached) in 1909.
Kollontai saw
two camps. In one camp were the feminists, who from Kollontai’s point of view
were bourgeois feminists, by definition. In the other camp were women who were
proletarian, or else partisans of the proletariat. She distinguished between
these two camps as follows:
“However apparently radical the demands of the feminists, one must not
lose sight of the fact that the feminists cannot, on account of their class
position, fight for that fundamental transformation of the contemporary
economic and social structure of society without which the liberation of women
cannot be complete.
“If in certain circumstances the short-term tasks of women of all classes
coincide, the final aims of the two camps, which in the long term determine the
direction of the movement and the tactics to be used, differ sharply. While for
the feminists the achievement of equal rights with men in the framework of the
contemporary capitalist world represents a sufficiently concrete end in itself,
equal rights at the present time are, for the proletarian women, only a means
of advancing the struggle against the economic slavery of the working class.
The feminists see men as the main enemy, for men have unjustly seized all
rights and privileges for themselves, leaving women only chains and duties. For
them a victory is won when a prerogative previously enjoyed exclusively by the
male sex is conceded to the ‘fair sex’.
“Proletarian women have a different attitude. They do not see men as the
enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades,
who share with them the drudgery of the daily round and fight with them for a
better future. The woman and her male comrade are enslaved by the same social
conditions; the same hated chains of capitalism oppress their will and deprive
them of the joys and charms of life. It is true that several specific aspects
of the contemporary system lie with double weight upon women, as it is also
true that the conditions of hired labour sometimes turn working women into
competitors and rivals to men. But in these unfavourable situations, the
working class knows who is guilty.”
“The working woman is first and foremost a member of the working class.”
Having thus
strongly made her fundamental case, Kollontai proceeds to discuss “Marriage and
the Problem of the Family”. This is where, as Frederick Engels had noted a
quarter of a century before Kollontai in his “Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State”, capitalism corresponds
to the oppression of women, arising from the ancient history of property, still
continuing in the present time.
Engels
demonstrated that the form of marriage in any society had always coincided with
the relations of production. Kollontai, discussing the work of the bourgeois
feminist Ellen Key, comes to the point of asking, in the second of the two
following paragraphs: “Does the family wither away?”
“Ellen Key’s devotion to the obligations of maternity and the family
forces her to give an assurance that the isolated family unit will continue to
exist even in a society transformed along socialist lines. The only change, as
she sees it, will be that all the attendant elements of convenience or of
material gain will be excluded from the marriage union, which will be concluded
according to mutual inclinations, without rituals or formalities — love and
marriage will be truly synonymous. But the isolated family unit is the result
of the modem individualistic world, with its rat-race, its pressures, its
loneliness; the family is a product of the monstrous capitalist system. And yet
Key hopes to bequeath the family to socialist society! Blood and kinship ties
at present often serve, it is true, as the only support in life, as the only refuge
in times of hardship and misfortune. But will they be morally or socially
necessary in the future? Key does not answer this question. She has too loving
a regard for the “ideal family”, this egoistic unit of the middle bourgeoisie
to which the devotees of the bourgeois structure of society look with such
reverence.
“But it is not only the talented though erratic Ellen Key who loses her
way in the social contradictions. There is probably no other question about
which socialists themselves are so little in agreement as the question of
marriage and the family. Were we to try and organise a survey among socialists,
the results would most probably be very curious. Does the family wither away?
or are there grounds for believing that the family disorders of the present are
only a transitory crisis? Will the present form of the family be preserved in
the future society, or will it be buried with the modem capitalist system?
These are questions which might well receive very different answers. ...”
Kollontai answers
her own questions, thus:
“…the social influences are so complex and their interactions so diverse
that it is impossible to foretell what the relationships of the future, when
the whole system has fundamentally been changed, will be like.
“…ritual marriage and the compulsive isolated
family are doomed to disappear.”
To finish,
Kollontai returns to the class question and the conflict of interest between
the proletarian and the bourgeois feminists.
· The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: The Social
Basis of the Woman Question, Kollontai, 1909.
