No Woman, No Revolution, Part 3
Socialism
impossible without the women
If we do not draw women into public activity, into the
militia, into political life; if we do not tear women away from the deadening
atmosphere of household and kitchen; then it is impossible to secure real
freedom, it is impossible even to build democracy, let alone socialism.
The above quote from Lenin (pictured above, speaking in the open air in
the revolutionary year of 1917) expresses as clearly as can be the full meaning
of our series title: “No Woman, No
Revolution”.
Yet it was not democracy in general of which Lenin wrote. In Lenin’s
eyes, democracy is not an abstract value. Democracy can never be a substitute
for class struggle. Democracy is an instrument of class struggle.
The following words were written by Lenin for the second anniversary of
the Great October Revolution. They are included in the attached compilation,
also downloadable from the link below:
“Let the liars and
hypocrites, the dull-witted and blind, the bourgeois and their supporters
hoodwink the people with talk about freedom in general, about equality in
general, about democracy in general.
“We say to the
workers and peasants: Tear the masks from the faces of these liars, open the
eyes of these blind ones. Ask them:
“Equality between
what sex and what other sex?
“Between what
nation and what other nation?
“Between what class
and what other class?
“Freedom from what
yoke, or from the yoke of what class? Freedom for what class?
“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!
“Freedom and
equality for the workers, for the toiling peasants!
“A fight against
the oppressors, a fight against the capitalists, a fight against the
profiteering kulaks!
“That is our
fighting slogan, that is our proletarian truth, the truth of the struggle
against capital, the truth which we flung in the face of the world of capital
with its honeyed, hypocritical, pompous phrases about freedom and
equality in general, about freedom and equality for all.”
Lenin,
Soviet Power and the Status of Women, November 1919
In the document linked below you will also find that in September of the
same year of 1919 there was already a “Fourth Moscow City Conference Of
Non-Party Working Women”, that was addressed by Lenin (and also by Trotsky).
When Lenin wrote in 1917 - between the two revolutions of that year, and
before he had returned to Russia - that “it is impossible even to build
democracy, let alone socialism” without the women, he also prefigured the
National Democratic Revolution altogether, with the clear implication that
democratic class struggle is a prerequisite of socialism.
In the last line of the text for this session, Lenin repeats the “No
Woman, No Revolution” message:
The proletariat
cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.
Lenin,
To the Working Women, February 1920
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Lenin on Women, 1919 - 1920.
